Sun was embracing Open Source to some degree - though they were always a little schizophrenic on that policy, and never really held to a clear position for about 3-5 years in the middle - but the last few years they seemed to "get it". While this is a minor change (it doesn't appear to affect OpenSolaris) it does seem to be indicative of Oracle taking a few (small) steps away from that position.
But, on the flip side (and I say this as someone who learned Unix on SunOS 2.6 in 1998 - I still type ps -ef, and as a Joyent user, though tcsh has given way to bash in my finger memory) - Solaris really is an edge operating system for the masses, somewhat more akin to AIX. Pretty much the common (server) OS for the masses is Linux, with Open/Free/NetBSD making up the majority of those not going with Windows.
The only people I know using Solaris these days (and this is just an anecdote, so be gentle :-) are people running Oracle or other environments that need to be enterprise robust on vertically scaled system, people using sparc gear, or people who have a legacy investment in Solaris. This is sad - as few as five years ago, Solaris was still a popular choice for new companies - the OS was just so rock solid stable.
I'd love to hear a YC survey on OS choices for server backends - my bet is 50%+ on Linux/BSD, less than 10% Solaris.
I'm wondering what percentage of the remaining 40% is Windows, and if AIX ever gets a vote. I'm presuming HPUX is not chosen for new companies any more, and I fervently pray that everyone steers clear of SCO.
I'm willing to bet that your percentages are off. I would say at least 85% of the folks around here use Linux on their servers, with a 1-5% using a BSD and the 1-14% using Windows. Solaris (read OpenSolaris) filling in the gaps within the fluctuations above.. which is a shame, there is some really cool technology in OpenSolaris/Solaris 10.
I think your predictions are pretty accurate. I would use Solaris because it does have a lot of cool features (Solaris zones being one of the most interesting to me), but I'm unsure about the licensing situation, so I've held off for now.
The thing that has always impressed me about Solaris is its well-roundedness. Not the user-environment, which compares badly to typical linux and BSD setups (svrV vs BSD kludge; standard install lacks lots of useful tools; dev tools and libraries less likely to have support). Rather, the mechanisms that bind it to the hardware, and allow you to do types of control and monitoring that aren't feasible with linux/freebsd stuff. Solaris has had that close-to-the-hardware advantage.
Personally I've migrated from FreeBSD to Ubuntu for my at home server tasks. At work, I've seen a variety of deployments, never one of Solaris.
I'd say 30% Windows, 60% Linux, 10% FreeBSD (instance installs (host and vm's), not including embedded systems like routers) is what I've seen over the past 5 years are work.
Of Linux I've seen SUSE, RHEL, and Ubuntu widely used. I've seen deliveries of Sun Servers with Solaris installed that were wiped to be replaced with Linux.
On the Windows side, I've seen environments where it's Windows Server heavy require drastically more resources to maintain, but that's another conversation.
Of course this is all anecdotal as I've also never seen anyone deploy OSX Server in any capacity :)
What I really think it is, is people use what they are familiar with or what they can get support for. Solaris has disappeared mostly from the desktop, so people are less familiar.
Hell the last time I tried to experiment with OpenSolaris I couldn't get it booted in VMware (graphical corruption), so I never had a chance to get familar with it myself.
To bad too, DTrace and ZFS always sounded fantastic.
I've also never seen anyone deploy OSX Server in any capacity
I've done it, but it wasn't very pretty. Well, I mean the admin tools are a pretty GUI, but underneath it is all a BSD, but instead of being able to upgrade components, you're tied to a vendor that doesn't really update things that way. For example, I had 2 G5 Xserves running 10.3 (Panther) and one Intel Xserve running 10.4 (Tiger). Unfortunately upgrading the version of Python or MySQL on the systems was a royal pain in the ass. Custom configurations is also odd, because they do a lot of custom stuff to the point that it isn't quite a *nix. But if you run off the shelf things designed for a Mac Server or need to use one of the Core Media frameworks they would be good. However, for typical web stuff, they really aren't that good of a server. Great hardware though... I'd love to rip out the Mac OS and put Linux of them.
To put this back into context for the post, OSX Server is probably deployed less often than Solaris.
My last job, about 80% of the systems were Solaris, 15% AIX and 5% Linux/Windows. Granted, this was a large financial institution.
The place prior to that was about 90% OpenBSD, 10% Arch Linux. A startup.
And before that, probably about 25% Linux, 40% Windows, and the rest were a good balance of AIX and Solaris, at a community college. For what it's worth, the college was using Solaris for students to play on, and Sun curriculum for "UNIX" courses, with the thought that students could go get Sun Certified when they're done with the class; and if they did so, wouldn't need to take the final exam. I'm not sure that'll be an option in the future.
I'm using Nexenta (Debian/Ubuntu-based userland on OpenSolaris kernel) for my home NAS, primarily because of ZFS. Works well enough, but of course it's not a production server.
Personally, I use Linux servers, but at work we still buy and use Solaris 10 on Sun boxes. Yes, 90% of the databases we access are Oracle. Yes it's very enterprisey.
But, on the flip side (and I say this as someone who learned Unix on SunOS 2.6 in 1998 - I still type ps -ef, and as a Joyent user, though tcsh has given way to bash in my finger memory) - Solaris really is an edge operating system for the masses, somewhat more akin to AIX. Pretty much the common (server) OS for the masses is Linux, with Open/Free/NetBSD making up the majority of those not going with Windows.
The only people I know using Solaris these days (and this is just an anecdote, so be gentle :-) are people running Oracle or other environments that need to be enterprise robust on vertically scaled system, people using sparc gear, or people who have a legacy investment in Solaris. This is sad - as few as five years ago, Solaris was still a popular choice for new companies - the OS was just so rock solid stable.
I'd love to hear a YC survey on OS choices for server backends - my bet is 50%+ on Linux/BSD, less than 10% Solaris.
I'm wondering what percentage of the remaining 40% is Windows, and if AIX ever gets a vote. I'm presuming HPUX is not chosen for new companies any more, and I fervently pray that everyone steers clear of SCO.