Subject: Re: differing flavours of unix
From: Arthur Corliss (arthur@corlissfamily.org)
Date: Thu Mar 14 2002 - 18:05:51 AKST
> Does somebody know of a nice short table that lists the differing major
> flavours of unix, with the advantages and disadvantages of each, and
> why one would particularly choose [solaris, tru-64, aix, SCO, ???]
> for given tasks?
You've left out IRIX and HP/UX, if you're concentrating on supported
commercial Unices. As to pros & cons, that's almost as religious an argument
as vi versus emacs. ;-)
In practice, AIX and HP/UX seem to own the enterprise for big iron
applications (data-warehousing, etc.), Solaris has a bigger presence in the
Internet market than anywhere else, IRIX is huge in CAD/modeling,
broadcasting, and scientific markets, and is Tru-64 even have a roadmap on
Alpha anymore? Didn't they say they were going to concentrate on an Itanium
port? I couldn't say off-hand what their core market is, but someone else on
this certainly can.
Since each runs on a proprietary architecture, the types of workloads they're
better at is more hardware-constrained than software-constrained, based on
the types of bottlenecks in the system. The software vendors, of course, are
going to target the majority of their development in the core compentencies
of each architecture, so the availability of certain types of applications
also plays a determining factor in which UNIX you bring in-house.
As for SCO, I have absolutely no use for that variant. ;-)
----Arthur Corliss Bolverk's Lair -- http://arthur.corlissfamily.org/ Digital Mages -- http://www.digitalmages.com/ "Live Free or Die, the Only Way to Live" -- NH State Motto
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