48 ;LOGIN: VOL. 35, NO. 6
PETER BAER GALVIN
Pete’s all things Sun:
comparing Solaris to
RedHat Enterprise and
AIX
Peter Baer Galvin is the chief technologist for
Corporate Technologies, a premier systems
integrator and VAR (www.cptech.com).
Before that, Peter was the systems manager
for Brown University’s Computer Science
Department. He has written articles and
columns for many publications and is co-
author of the Operating Systems Concepts
and Applied Operating Systems Concepts
textbooks. As a consultant and trainer, Peter
teaches tutorials and gives talks on security
and system administration worldwide. Peter
blogs at http://www.galvin.info and twitters
as “PeterGalvin.”
pbg@cptech.com
THESE ARE TRYING TIMES IN SOLARIS-
land. The Oracle purchase of Sun has caused
many changes both within and outside of
Sun. These changes have caused some soul-
searching among the Solaris faithful. Should
a system administrator with strong Solaris
skills stay the course, or are there other
operating systems worth learning? The
decision criteria and results will be different
for each system administrator, but in this
column I hope to provide a little input to
help those going down that path.
Based on a subjective view of the industry, I opine
that, apart from Solaris, there are only three
worthy contenders: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and
its identical twins, such as Oracle Unbreakable
Linux), AIX, and Windows Server. In this column
I discuss why those are the only choices, and
start comparing the UNIX variants. The next
column will contain a detailed comparison of the
virtualization features of the contenders, as that is
a full topic unto itself.
Choices
There are certainly many operating systems, and
many of those are “good.” However, there are
only some that a Solaris administrator would find
interesting professionally. Those are the operating
systems that could subsume, or at least co-exist
with, Solaris in a datacenter. Such operating
systems need to be scalable, reliable, secure, and
powerful. For a sysadmin to bother devoting
the time and intellectual effort to learning a new
operating system, it must also have a future, both
technologically and commercially. Based on that
reasoning, many operating systems fail to make
the cut. Linux certainly has a future, and meets
the aforementioned datacenter qualifications.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the leading
commercial Linux in the USA, if not the world, so
that version is included. AIX 7.1 is (surprisingly to
me) feature rich, and runs on the excellent Power 7
CPU, making it a worthy contender. HP-UX is not
included on my list, as its feature set has not kept
pace, and the servers it runs on don’t appear to be
compelling enough for a site to switch from their
Sun servers. Windows Server 2008 is certainly a
valid choice, but a technical comparison between
it and other operating systems is unlikely to cause
anyone to switch toward or away from it. And
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