Re: Solaris vs. Linux sun vs intel ???

I'm going to have to call you on this post. 10 threads down, you're posting about how you can't understand tablespace allocation & extension. Stock install, on linux. I'm just not brimming with confidence for your DBA skills.

But I'll do point for point anyway.

Bastiaan Schaap <bschaap_at_desyde.nl> wrote:
: Everyone mentions IO bandwith, performance and prices here, but I always

That's because it's really fucking important. And my point was that perf on the Suns was better, but if you make the effort, you can get quite close with PCs (to the low end Suns, 220s & the like).

: prefer to compare such different systems in terms of TCO. (total cost of
: ownership). It is true that the initial investment that has to be made for

Yeah, we know what TCO is.

: the sun/solaris platform is much bigger, no doubt. However these costs are
: most of the time only a fraction of the total cost a company has to spend in
: order to get a system working or (even more important) keep it working. My

How about compared to $20k per processor per year for Oracle? The OS choice is chump change. That's just not what we're talking about here.

: experience is that the information and support available for Oracle on
: linux/intel platforms is hard to find, and most of the time very specific to
: a certain distro, kernel, etc. So the total cost for the maintenance of
: these machines is MUCH higher than for Oracle on the sun/solaris platform.

Lay off the weed, man. I'm swimming in linux/Ora docs, technet.oracle can hook you up, or just google it. 'Specific to distro' is total crap, as is kernel - the official Oracle docs are very specific - glibc 2.1, certain segment & shared mem tuning params in the kernel. Any competent admin could handle those requirements over lunch, while keeping one hand on a sandwich at all times.
The only 2 datums you have entered are 'information hard to find' and 'kernel specific'. How does that prove "MUCH" higher TCO? I'm thinking my admin could find the docs, scream at the Oracle support person, or whatever, and maybe spend a few days playing with Linux that he wouldn't have played with Solaris. Hardly an order-of-magnitude jump in costs.

: Keep in mind that Oracle themselves use sun/solaris as their development
: environment (!), and a lot of support concerning Oracle and Sun hardware is
: widely available and very specific. Currently we are running 32 databases

That is strongly correct, and the best argument in your post. Bug fixes will appear on Solaris, no contest.

: on linux, and we're in the process of migrating *all* of them to Sun
: enterprise 2500's.

Um, because you can pack 8 processors & 16-64 GB of RAM in one box, and drop the migration software? Oh, I see Sun isn't offering 2500s in the states anymore; nonetheless.

: After carefully determining our TCO of the linux boxes,
: we've come to the conclusion that maintenance costs are actually much lower
: for the sun/solaris platform (over a 5yr period)...

Uh huh. And you got 5 years of data of Oracle on Linux how, exactly?

Funny; there are good & bad reasons for both platforms, but you seem to have missed most of them, and hit the wrong ones. Received on Wed Apr 04 2001 - 06:52:43 CDT