[OpenAFS] Overview? Linux filesystem choices

[Booker Bense]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Robert Milkowski wrote:

>
> I'm curious - did you pay for the support before or did you use a free 
> version with no support?

Until thumpers priced themselves out of the market, we just 
bought Solaris hardware and the support that goes with it.
Sun gave academic institutions a significant discount so
there hardware could compete. That's gone.

They have also significantly changed the rules about OS support 
to make it extremely unattractive.

>
> IIRC if you want to run Solaris 10 on non-Oracle x86 hardware (Dell, HP, ...) 
> the support cost, which covers license as well, is 1000$ per CPU socket per 
> year list price.
>

There has been a great deal of confusion about whether Oracle is 
really going to support that or not and whether that will be true
for Solaris 11.

But if that's the price, it's so expensive nobody will bother.
If you care enough to have ZFS, you'll just buy Oracle hardware.

ZFS has some really nice features, but Oracle just priced 
themselves out of the market for scientific computing.

It's hard enough to sell buying enterprise disks and servers, 
when consumer stuff is much cheaper[1], but add a doubling of the 
head node price to have a safe filesystem and it just won't fly.

- Booker C. Bense

[1]- "But I can get a 2 TB disk at fry's for $150..." Wish I had 
a nickle for every time I've heard that.