What is on Your Mind?

I was just a-wondering through some hardware and software sites, and in one of them, I was scrolling down a UNIX os page when I noticed that the prices for these OS's were climbing alarmingly high; in the 5 to 10 G's.

Imagine my surprise when I saw one particular UNIX os selling for 65 freakin' thousand buckos!

So, my question is... what would make a UNIX os so expensive, and who/what would use/pay for it???

Commercial-grade unix is intended for companies to use for their critical business functions, not for hobbyists or home users. That is the context you need to be thinking of when you see those prices.

For example, at one of my previous jobs we ran a database for one of our clients. That database had details on over 10 million of their customers and hundreds of millions of rows of data. The needed access to it almost 24/7 with 100% uptime except for scheduled outages. It ran on a half-million dollar server and had terabytes of expensive EMC disk arrays behind it. Paying thousands of dollars for a stable, secure, high-availablity OS is not even an issue in a situation like that. The cost of the OS is a drop in the bucket compared to the hardware, software licensing (oracle in this case) and penalties we would have had to pay for not meeting service level agreements due to outages.

Large corporations need a "safety valve" for operations liability. If they purchase expensive servers with full support by large companies, and production operations fail, they can blame, or "turn to", the platform provider, who was under contract to provide hardware, software, and service. If they use "cheap free UNIX" and there is a failure, corporations have no "scapegoat" to point to. This is standard, risk management operations, in large organizations.

Hi,

I can understand what you all mean, but I believe that MySQL has virtually no limits; so it would seem that any UNIX/Linux flavor hooked to MySQL should do pretty well also... yes? no?

What I'm curious about is what makes such an OS so special/expensive?
Is it more complex code, or more robust code, or just more code?
After all, code is code. It's just bits and bytes.

So what is the money actually buying for 65 G's ?

see like im only 12 i have no clue what this stuff is about so if someone could add me on msn or send me an email saying that theyll help me that'd be great : ...

What you are getting is a more proven, tested, solid OS. Solaris and Oracle can simply do things that MySQL on Linux can not do. The commercial Unix varieties are offered by companies with hundreds of engineers with lots of experience building their OS. The free varieties don't have that. Therefore the commerical Unix vendors provide features free Unix doesn't have, for example Solaris has dtrace, and the next version will have ZFS for managing your filesystems. No version of Linux has tools comparable to those. And typically commercial releases are more stable due to much more work being put into the release (and more testing). Paying all those engineers to work on it full time means you get a lot more effort being put into it then relying on volunteers.

Also the point Neo made is very true. You are paying for support also when you buy that $65,000 OS. If my Solaris box crashes at 3 in the morning I can call Sun and if the support staff can't figure it out immediately they'll have a kernel engineer talking to me within an hour or two helping troubleshoot it. As an example of the kind of support you get, I remember one instance where our E10K (Sun's top of the line circa 2001) had a hardware problem. A Sun hardware engineer showed up at our office within 2 hours and he had about a quarter million dollars worth of spare parts couriered to us at the same time so that no matter what the problem turned out to be he could replace it without having to wait for parts to be delivered. You can't get anywhere near the level of support a commercial Unix vendor gives you with free versions. You can pay Redhat or another linux company for support if you want, but then you end up paying just as much. And to be honest, Sun, IBM or HP probably have more OS engineers than Redhat has total employees - which do you think will be better able to support critical systems when there are problems?

THAT is what you are paying for when you buy commerical Unix.

well, not totaly true. best example is sun. if you buy sun hardware the solaris licenses are included. since solaris 10 you may use solaris without paying, but you don't get support for that. (solaris 7,8,9 were also free for education and developing purpose). but if you need support you will have to buy licenses. and a solaris license is much cheaper than a redhat enterprise or suse license for the same cpu-count. if anyone would buy a redhat license for a 128 CPU mashine they would also have to pay 1000s of dollars....
sun makes a very nice way with there products, the most of them like the cluster, mailer, hsm, .... are free to download and to "use" for testing purpose, no keys, no closed extra functions, but if you want to use it commercially with support, you have to pay for it, and yes, then it is expensive ;-)
never forget, the linux kernel is free, but not the commercial distributions

gP