Commercial Unixes -- Narcissism of small differences
|
The term
describes the manner in which our negative feelings are
sometimes directed at people who resemble us, while we take
pride from the "small differences" that distinguish us from
them.
Narcissism of small differences - Wikipedia |
System administrators in large enterprises do not determine the Unix mix they
would prefer to work with. This "unix mix" is usually the product of the firm
historical development,
acquisitions
and preferences/contacts of higher management. While we can't dictate what
ingredients this mix for a particular firm contains, one property of this mix
can, with some effort, be controlled. This is number of elements in the mix.
It is a noble goal to try
to minimize the number of supported flavors and, indirectly, total
cost of ownership (TCO) across the several types of Unix flavors used in a particular
large enterprise. And that often can be done by eliminating one or two less
important and less widely used Unix flavors.
...the total cost of ownership of Unix as an OS class is highly correlated with the number of
Unix flavors used: increasing the number of Unix flavors used in large enterprise
datacenter typically
results in
increasing total cost of ownership independently of
which flavor of Unix you are adding: Solaris, Linux or something else.
Please note that I am talking not about cash-strapped
universities, start-ups or firms located in developing
countries. I am talking about making decisions in the large enterprise environment
which is by definition is "well to do" (although now far from being flush with money)
Also it is interesting to note that this point is one of top selling points of
Windows: with all its shortcomings, there is not equivalent to "Unix hell"
in Windows world.
Here are some points from my paper "Solaris vs Linux" that by-and-large are
applicable to the whole spectrum of Unix system used in large coporations:
- Due to modern Unixes overcomplexity a regular sysadmin and/or
OS developer has a strong preference for a single ("loved") OS
and defend it against all other OSes independently of
its real or perceived advantages / disadvatages. In this sense the
treatment of Solaris by Linux camp represents
a perfect example of
Narcissism of small differences --
the tendency to exaggerate the
dissimilarities of those who resemble us in an effort to buttress
our own self-regard...
Most Linux advocates has little
real-life experience with other Unix platforms. In a way this situation confirms saying
that "academic quarrels are so vicious because the differences are so
small".
- Linux movement was and is a political movement. The
simplest and the most convincing illustration of this thesis is the
treatment of AIX vs. Solaris. Any non-drunk system administrator with AIX
experience knows that this is a very idiosyncratic flavor of Unix that
stands farther from linux that any other commercial Unix. Still not without help of IBM marketing and IBM money,
AIX is billed as Linux friendly OS. For those who never administered AIX, AIX
does not even implement normal run levels -- you cannot change run level
to 0 or S to get to system maintenance mode, there is no such thing (the guy
who wrote init man page for AIX has perfect sense of humor: he dryly stated
that those levels are "reserved for future operating system expansion"
;-). Level
2 is standard and for all practical purposes the only run level used by AIX. There is no standard
syslog
daemon running in default configuration. Many commands are
unique to AIX and some ( a lot ;-) were introduced with a regular IBM sadist
addiction to adding useless or slightly different commands. And so on
and so forth. In a way AIX is in the same way POSIX compatible as
Windows is POSIX compatible (and yes, Windows with Interix installed is
POSIX compatible). Let's stop at this point.
- Enterprise OS mix behaves like an ecosystem and side effects
as well as complexity of the task of adding yet another flavor on Unix
in a large enterprise environment (be it linux or Solaris) should
not be underestimated. Those side effects tend to eat into savings.
Proliferation of unix flavors increases sysadmin overload and lessens
the quality of each individual environment as workforce became spread
too thin and lack critical mass necessary for acquiring and improving
knowledge. With large overload the situation became more about survival
then about quality. Even with huge cost-effectiveness of Intel Duo CPUs
killing one of existing flavors of Unix in organizations which use more
then two flavors usually can save more than adopting a new one, be it
Solaris on Intel or Linux. Cost and tradeoffs typical for excessive
diversity of Unix environment are often ignored in simplistic calculations
of benefits of linux adoption (or any other new flavor if Unix adoption).
- Excessive complexity of modern OSes leads to "lowest common denominator"
style of deployment in large enterprise environment; the more flavors are
used the less customized and less productive deployment of each and every
flavor is. In case all flavors of Unix are used (not uncommon situation for
many large enterprises) each flavor is used in the least productive fashion. The mere fact of presence of several flavors
of Unix almost guarantees that some of the most interesting and unique
capabilities of a particular flavor of Unix will not be used.
Some can be poorly understood and thus underutilized (RBAC and zones
in Solaris, ACLs, bash 3.2 debugger, expect, Jumpstart/kickstart, flash
archive in Solaris). Many features are typically disabled or misconfigured
(built-in firewall, RHEL SELinux, SUSE AppArmore, Xen,
snapshot capability of linux LVM, etc). Typically the most
advanced usage of OS can be observed in mono-culture and dual-flavors
environments. Dull, absent of any ingenuity, basic deployment style
is a rule in any environment with more then two flavors of Unix used.
That significantly increase TCO both directly (lower productivity of
equipment and people) and indirectly (acquisition of packages and hardware
with the explicit goal to tame the excessively diverse environments)
- Enterprise linux flavors are in all dimensions very similar to
proprietary software and generally suffer from the same weaknesses (and
first of all overcomplexity) with some (instability) even more pronounced.
Promises have been made. Assurances have been given. Commitments
have been published. But far less has been delivered. Linux became just
another operating system choice, a clear case of be-careful-what-you-wish-for.
It is clear that in some more important in my view aspects linux
in technically inferior to Solaris 10, while in others less important
aspects Solaris 10 is inferior to enterprise linux flavors. But
in no way linux can claim technical leadership. It's more or less successfully
is following tailgates of proprietary Unix flavors (and not only Solaris).
Stability of enterprise linux distributions is definitely less then
stability of Solaris 10 and other major commercial Unix flavors (AIX
5.3 and HP-UX 11i). Linux distributions are rather bloated, complexity
of the kernel is high, regression testing is limited and sometimes errors
including kernel errors can be introduced during regular patching process
due to the update of the kernel or particular important subsystem.
"Blue screen of death" due to driver problems are not uncommon with
the only differences from Windows that at the time of the crash linux
kernel often is unable to display even the panic message.
Server simply froze. Patching in linux is more dangerous process
then in Solaris 10 and for critical servers, whenever possible, should
probably be limited to the minimum subset of security patches.
Due to stability problems linux should preferably be used in applications
were redundancy is built-in in the design (DNS, SMTP mail, web servers,
etc).
- Qualification of sysadmins are more important factor in stable
running of Unix flavors then the chosen flavor itself. It is reverse
proportional to the number of flavors that particular sysadmin needs to
service. Like there is no replacement for displacement, there is no substitute
for sysadmin qualification and
neither Solaris not linux can fly well and do not crash without experienced
pilots. High qualification can be
achieved only if sysadmin is responsible for no more then two flavors
of Unix. The diversity of Unix flavors in a large enterprise environment
should be tightly controlled and "counter proliferation" efforts should
be an important part of any sound enterprise datacenter policy.
If introduction of linux increases the diversity it generally
makes infrastructure less cost efficient, not more cost efficient.
This is connected with the fact that the complexity
of modern OSes had risen to the level when it is almost beyond the capability
of single, even very intelligent, person to understand them. Also OS
themselves represent a moving target (linux to more extent then Solaris
or, AIX, or HP-UX) with new versions arriving at regular intervals.
Due to this top level admin skills can be acquired only after many years
of hard work (forget about people claiming to be "experienced system
administrators" with just one or two years of administrator work under
the belt, unless they are former programmers on the same OS).
Due to the level of variety between different Unix flavors sysadmin
skills are to considerable extent Unix flavor specific and that's why
usually people tend "naturally" concentrate on a single ("loved") Unix
flavor and dislike others (in addition one "minor" flavor can be learned
reasonably well too). Administrators
with deep knowledge and passion for the particular Unix flavor currently
used in the datacenter represent important part of the company intellectual
capital, the capital that can be easily wasted in case
of transition. That actually might can help to explain such a
persistent phenomenon as "OS nationalism" often demonstrated in discussions
like Solaris vs. Linux as they usually pretty well resemble the style
of USA culture vs. Great Britain culture (Canada or Australia can be
substituted for Great Britain) discussions (you know both countries
share the same language, don't they ;-). Unix sysadmins who moved
to a different flavor of Unix feel much like expatriates for several
years as considerable part of their skills is Unix flavor specific and
the higher qualification they have is heavily based on deep knowledge
of this "specialized", flavor-specific part. For administrators
with almost a decade of experience in a particular Unix flavor under
the belt, to quote Linux Torvalds,
switching from administering one OS to another is not unlike “performing
brain surgery on yourself”. This is one of the major
reasons why adding any new Unix flavor to the large enterprise Unix
mix usually does not provide for expected savings.
From the point of view of sysadmin training Solaris
and linux are the most compatible with each other and least toxic pair
of enterprise Unix flavours available.
- It's important to distinguish price/performance benefits of Intel/AMD hardware from benefits
of the new OS adoption. Advantages of linux are too
often uncritically mixed with the advantages of switching to Intel/AMD
hardware and first of all its dramatically better (often twice or more
lower) price/performance ratio of Intel Duo CPUs in comparison
with Itanium and RISC CPUs.
But those price/performance advantages does not exist for OSes that can run
on Intel X86 hardware like Solaris 10 and FreeBSD.
At the same time any non Intel hardware has distinct advantages in security
(via obscurity, which contrary to naive views is an extremely important
factor) and, more often then not, stability.
- Linux plays a tremendously progressive role at large enterprise
environment as a counterbalance to strangulating IT bureaucracy.
Born as an alternative OS it still can live to its promise in this particular
environment. It permits running small, "guerilla" projects and experiment
with new technologies like scripting languages. It also can lessen
the negative effects of "pseudo-security" efforts of "overzealous
know-nothings" at desktop area. Actually, in security area large
enterprises IT should fear more from the bungling of the incompetent
than from the machinations of the wicked. In principle, Solaris
10 can play the same role, but it requires more efforts both in installation
on corporate desktops and configuring the necessary software.
Bureaucratization of IT has very positive influence on linux/Unix
adoption and significantly diminishes attractiveness of "pure"
Windows on desktop and stimulates adoption of "mixed" model with linux
and Solaris virtual instances.
The litmus test of the level of bureaucratization is prevalence of
form over substance and as a side effect fashion rules and logic does
not necessarily prevails in discussions about the relative benefits
of introduction of a new OS.
Aging IT bureaucracy like any other bureaucracy
develops goals strictly related to self-preservation. The more
dominant are those self-preservation tendencies the more bizarre and
damaging (from the point of view of common sense )enterprise IT moves
can be expected, the more politically motivated major technological
decisions become( misdirected
SOX compliance efforts are a good example here ) and the less they
care about you, the Unix administrator. On the other hand the
same bureaucracy in Windows space push the most technically astute users
to the "Unixland" as bizarre and arbitrary limitations make it difficult
to use Windows productively. With Active Directory group policies
available, Windows world more and more reminds mainframe world.
In this sense linux (and to lesser extent Solaris) serve a very positive
and extremely important role in modern IT: the role of "freedom fighters
weapon of last resort".
- Due to the complexity (should I say overcomplexity ?) of
modern Unixes the value of Sysadmin certification cannot be overestimated.
Having certified in particular flavor of Unix administration for
at least key administrators for the particular flavor is probably the most reliable
way to avoid rather painful errors and horror stories at the initial
stages of introduction of any new flavor of Unix. For example, it is
clear from the content of the paper, that the expertise in Solaris or
AIX administration is not directly translatable into linux domain and
attending one intro or "transitional" course is not enough -- such a
bootstrapping approach and the idea of "growing sysadmin expertise with
the system" might backfire discrediting the OS in question more then
actual or perceived shortcomings. At the same time linux certifications
suffer from the same "multiple-personalities disorder" that linux itself
. Among vendor certifications Red Hat certification
looks like more objective measure of skills and IQ then Sun's certification
(although I noticed several bad apples here too, it is more difficult
to fake by memorizing the material without understanding it).
Still Sun has an extremely good and largely deserved reputation
in terms of quality of support, training and certification. In those
areas it is superior to offerings from Novell or Red Hat although Red
Hat has an advantage of keeping training "in-house" while Sun outsourced
it and that negatively affects quality. Novell currently is more
democratic vendor as for training and certification in linux enterprise
space (Red Hat has the most expensive training and certification options,
expensive even if we are talking about large enterprise financial capabilities).
- After
more then fifteen long years, the zeal to build a brave new OS is cooling.
The leadership, from Linus Torvalds down to the lowliest kernel driver
coder, seems more tired than inspired. The ruling "Linux elite" seem
reluctant to make way for younger men. Cynicism due to "make money fast
zeal" among the Linux elite during dotcom boom and maladministration
of the kernel development further dulled the efforts. Moreover Linux
kernel development efforts are spread too thin trying to encompass all
the hardware spectrum from laptops to high end servers with just a fraction
of resources at hand in comparison with Microsoft. The decision by Linus
Torvalds to abandon stable branch of the kernel (previously with great
success maintained by Alan Cox) and essentially delegate debugging of
the kernel to distributors in version 2.6 does not help too. That
means that outside its major deployment area (low end servers, especially
front end web servers) you should expect raw spots. Solaris on X86 is
more suitable for midrange servers if and when corresponding applications
are available. Solaris is more focused on servers OS, although recently
Sun brass also tried to position Solaris 10 to be "all things to all
people" and repeat linux mistakes. In case you order Sun X86-based hardware
you get an important additional advantage
of using a single hardware and software vendor (which eliminates finger
pointing), the advantage that is absent for any enterprise
linux distribution.
- Contrary to hype, linux does not have advantages over Solaris
in the development model. With opening of the code Solaris adopted
the same model of distributed collaboration. And less democratic nature
of Solaris development with the core concentrated at a single place
might be more an advantage then liability. Large scale open source software
development projects actually stimulates hierarchical power redistribution
with the Great Chairman at the helm and less powerful but no less autocratic
"members of Politburo" as the second level of hierarchy, the
process of consolidation of power and emergence of elite that long before
linux kernel development saga was masterfully depicted in
Animal Farm (as
reflected in popular quote "all pigs are equal but some pigs are
more equal then others"). Like in fluids with certain concentration
of salts this process of "crystallization of the elite" is an
objective process that occurs independently of the will of the participants
and their goals. Moreover reliance on faceless Internet-based communication
might amplify some of problems typical for corporate environment and
stimulate power struggle at the expense of real work. Financed
by consortium of hardware and commercial software vendors cooperative
model used by linux (with the support of enthusiasts from many countries)
demonstrated weakness of architectural vision which in turn leads to
dominance of imitation at the expense of innovation. Wrong choice
of direction or changes that badly effect stability can propagate all
way to the top pretty easily as seeing the whole picture is a difficult
task even for the most devoted and talented developers. With the
current level of complexity of the kernel developers including Linus
Torvalds looks more like proverbial blind men and an elephant.
The traditional corporate model with more clear cut lines of responsibility
(when a person can be hired for a particular important task or fired
for a particular blunder), more concentrated presence of developers
at one place, partial suppression of "vanity fair" motives by copywriting
the work by faceless corporation and monetary stimulus like stock options
might be not as bad as some open source enthusiasts try to depict it.
One of undeniable advantages is that communication between key developers
can still be face-to-face.
Due to the age of linux there is an inevitable problem connected with
the forthcoming change of the leader, the change that is more problematic
and painful that similar change in proprietary unix teams.
- Solaris currently has more technically advanced kernel with much
better instrumentation capabilities (due to DTrace and solid
OS dump infrastructure) while linux has superior "external" personality.
Due to those advantages Solaris 10 is more suitable for deploying complex
applications like databases and ERP systems (for example Oracle and
SAP/R3). Dump infrastructure in linux is primitive and buggy.
Tracing also leaves much to be desired and far behind the capabilities
of DTrace. Due to better instrumentation with proper tuning Solaris
10 can achieve performance comparative or better then linux on X86 architecture.
This is especially true for complex applications like databases-driven
Web applications. While linux is definitely fast, rumors about linux
being significantly faster then Solaris 10 on Intel/AMD architecture
are greatly exaggerated. Actually Solaris has performance edge over
linux for applications that heavily use threads. Availability
of enterprise applications might still be a problem for the adoption
of Solaris 10 for X86.
As for "personality" of OS linux beats Solaris:
linux looks like more modern OS for administrators and provide them
with a lot on non-trivial and important capabilities (better package
management, YAST (which is now available on Red Hat due to Oracle porting
efforts), loopback interface, etc).
As for networking Solaris beat linux: better implementation of NFS
and other complex networking protocols, more flexible TCP-stack.
- On server level security side Solaris 10 has a substantial lead
over any linux distribution and its security mechanisms are less disruptive
for applications. Both RBAC implementation and zones are superior
to mechanisms used in current linux distributions (with the possible
exception of Suse AppArmor, which is a very elegant technology indeed).
Solaris RBAC has tremendous value as a security mechanism perfectly
suited for the large enterprise environment. In combination with zones
RBAC represents a unique method of preventing "root sharing hell" by
ensuring real separation of duties. Solaris zones essentially allows
application owner to control it own lightweight virtual machine and
as such greatly reduce conflicts in access control in Unix environment.
Recently Solaris RBAC also became one of few ways to channel large part
of SOX compliance efforts in a constructive way and limit the negative
influence of "SOX socialism" on large enterprise IT environment. For
RHEL 4 no amount of hardening can match the security of Solaris with
applications running in zones and well structured RBAC "separation of
duties". Suse AppAmor is an elegant technology and does has promise,
while RHEL security infrastructure suffers from overcomplexity and due
to overcomplexity actually is the weak spot of distribution (cases of
systematic switching it off in production servers are not rumors, they
are fact of life). This fact, combined with the necessity (and
dangers) of more frequent patching for linux means that maintaining
the same level security of servers on linux servers will always be more
expensive for large enterprises then maintaining the same level of security
on Solaris 10 servers be it X86 servers of UltraSparc servers.
Of course here like in most other areas the qualification of staff
is more important factor then differences between those two OSes.
-
Compatibility record of an enterprise OS matters and historically Linux has far from being impressive compatibility
record. That does mean that this is a show stoppers as in
enterprise environment servers are usually changed each three five years and
that means change of the OS too, but still there are issues with abrupt
changes that linux introduces via patching. Recently it became better (Suse is the leader in this
area), but patching which leads to incompatibilities is a real problem in
enterprise environment and that the most obvious solution (no patching ;-)
has its own drawbacks.
The second side of compatibility record is compatibility with windows. In a way both Linux and Solaris are niche players in the data center
stuffed with Microsoft servers and applications and as such should more
cooperate then compete. In X86 space both are definitely riding
on coattails of Microsoft as both the cost of X86 hardware and average
specifications (including typical amount of RAM) on low and midrange
are determined by Microsoft's share of the market. From the point
of view of X86 desktops and servers vendors like Dell neither
linux not Solaris really matter. Large companies now decide about Solaris
or Linux, not because they hate one and love another; but because of
perceived risks, TCO and how well it will play with their Microsoft
part of infrastructure. That means that a good interoperability
with Microsoft is vital and more cooperation between teams is essential. After
all old saying states that the enemy of my enemy is my friend ;-)
And yest another side of compatibility record the danger of proliferation
of flavours. It should be stresses that Solaris does not have
the danger of proliferation of flavors. Even after Oracle bough sun
Solaris remain Solaris -- a single brand of OS. This issue cannot
be swept under the carpet as there is a real danger to bet on a wrong
horse and later face the necessity to support two enterprise flavors
of linux in one organization. The leading linux vendor (currently Red
Hat) does not occupy very stable position (Oracle alternative support
model really cuts into Red Hat profits) and can be eventually displaced
by Novell Suse which enjoys some Microsoft support or (less likely) Ubuntu which is currently a rising
star among linux distributions. Red Hat already lost to Ubuntu
a lion share of the market in linux netbooks. Suse has been tuning kernel
for AMD for a few years (they actually wrote the GCC x86-64 back-end) and now
enjoys support of IBM. All-in-all internal linux fragmentation
is the replay of old Unix wars and as such is an underestimated threat.
Few people believe that enterprise system administrators can benefit from remembering
3 ways of doing things, for example, changing resolution of the screen
(one for Suse, one for Red Hat and one for Ubuntu).
Just a threat of
competing distribution winning at the marketplace over adopted in the
particular company (say, Suse vs. Red Hat) somewhat creates serious
disruptions and inconsistent policy as for "approved flavors list". No amount of hype can hide the fact that the cost of
switching from one flavor of enterprise linux to another is comparable
with the cost of switching from one proprietary Unix to another: a very
similar vendor lock-in and associated problems with re-certification
of applications, partial retraining of administrators, etc. No
amount of Linus Torvalds interviews can hide the fact the linux is fragmented
into two major enterprise flavors which can be viewed as competing OSes
with common kernel. If you do not understand the value of single
version of OS please browse
Windows evangelism
documents starting from page 9. While it is highly Microsoft-centric
it's pretty instructive as for the role of single standard for the prosperity
of ISVs. Note the knockdown of competitors with .NET recently achieved
by Microsoft.
Companies are constantly looking for ways to
improve their business and gain a competitive edge. Often, these
newfound opportunities for improvement have the potential to affect a
company's basic IT infrastructure and may require the migration of core
applications and databases to a new environment.
A successful migration can bring substantial benefits. If executed
correctly, it can offer real business advantages and rewards. Yet, if
you wait until you need to migrate, many analysts say you've waited too
long. The "if it isn't broken don't fix it" philosophy is a dangerous
practice and can cost a company significantly more to migrate when it
becomes critical or necessary due to such factors as loss of faith in
current vendor, poor performance of current vendor, high costs of
support from current vendor.
HP's new
Sun Complete Care program offers free migration consulting,
special financing terms such as 90-day payment deferral, server
trade-in credit and rebates, up to 85 percent off HP-UX 11i with
Solaris trade-in, up to 30 percent off training programs and other
incentives.
Hat tip to
Solaris Migration resources in the SPARC Product Directory
IDC interviewed 400 Unix/RISC customers about their attitudes to
migration. The average interview time was 30 minutes. It makes very
interesting reading. The report says Sun is the main target for
migration and the clock is ticking. Here are some extracts...
"Sun Solaris continues to be the most popular Unix variant for
Unix servers running Web infrastructure. While this is not
surprising given the dot-com success that Sun enjoyed in the late
1990s and into 2000, it does continue to represent a challenge for
Sun because these workloads have been frequent targets for migration
over the past five years."
"IDC believes that the server life-cycle issues are driving much
of this change, because the systems in the Unix installed base have
aged in recent years, and this is compounded by the fact that many
dot-com era installations with Web enablement of business workloads,
are coming of age and will require replacement. In addition, many
Unix/RISC servers were deployed in preparation for Y2K and many of
these systems are now nearing the end of their useful life cycle."
...read the article (pdf),
...IDC profile,
Solaris Migration Resources
Internal
External
ORACLE-BASE - UNIX Commands for DBAs
AIX to Solaris
Operating System Migration Solutions
Linux Migration Guide - OpenSolaris
Migrating from Linux to Solaris or OpenSolaris - Solaris Developer ...
Solaris to HP-UX
HP Solaris-to-HP-UX Porting Kit
Porting Solaris code onto Itanium HP-UX 11i and Red Hat.
HP to AIX migration - Network Tuning parameters - Toolbox for IT ...
HP
Simplifies Migration for Sun Solaris Customers to More ...
Migrating from Solaris to HP-UX-components
Computerworld > HP's blue light special- 85% off HP-UX with ...
HP-UX to
Solaris Migration
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to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer
Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by
two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt.
Ph.D
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Last modified:
March 12, 2019
