April 29, 2005

How do you like your choices?

When I first started working at Talis some 6 years ago our Data Centre was full to bursting with Sun Servers, we had maybe two Intel boxes and one of those was running Novell Netware.

In the customer base all Talis software ran on Solaris and Sybase (DGUX was before my time). For a brief period I also worked on SCO Zenix, but I try not to think about that.

Slowly but surely things have been changing. We now have at least as many Intel Servers as we do Sun Servers, and we have a pretty even mix of Windows Server 2003, RedHat Enterprise Linux and Sun Solaris. Thankfully Novell Netware is nowhere in sight.

It’s becoming a similar story for customers. When Talis Prism was released RedHat Linux became the primary platform, but not the only platform, it can also be deployed on Solaris on SPARC and MS Windows on Intel.

Similarly Talis List and Talis Signpost will run on both SPARC and Intel based hardware, they can also use either Sybase ASE or PostgreSQL as the RDBMS.

Much as I like Sun and Solaris, it was always inevitable that we would need the ability to deploy Talis software on different platforms.

As I see it there are a number of reasons for this.

  1. ICT departments are becoming increasingly involved in the tender process and each has their own favoured platforms.
  2. Certain technologies work better on certain platforms. For example front-end web services on Linux, large scale enterprise systems on Solaris, thick client applications on Microsoft Windows.
  3. This industry can be volatile; there are obvious risks from relying on a single supplier.
  4. Different platforms suit different customers. SPARC hardware is not the ideal platform for small local authorities or colleges, although Sun hardware continues to improve in this area.
  5. And last but not least to give customers a choice!

There are of course a number of technical and commercial hurdles that must first be overcome but the combinations of hardware, operating system, RDBMS and web server on which Talis software can be deployed will continue to increase. In my book this can only be seen as a good thing.

Posted by Jim Prince at 08:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 26, 2005

Solaris 10 Investigation

Back in August I wrote a short post on my personal blog about Solaris 10. Now more than 6 month's later I've finally had the opportunity to install Sun's new OS.

The installation process was pretty much identical to any other version of Solaris I've installed and somewhat disappointingly took most of the afternoon. On the plus side the installation went without a hitch and the machine was soon up and running on our local network.

Although I haven't had chance to delve into the new features in any detail yet, I am hopeful that I'll have a fully functioning Talis LMS up and running by the end of the week.

In terms of the new features I’m keen to check out the benefits of Solaris Containers, a technology that I’m sure could be put to good use in our own Data Centre. Basically Solaris containers allow you to give several different applications their own private environment.

This ability to have virtualised systems within a single server is appealing and I'm sure will be useful for Server consolidation. As an example there are a number of Servers in our own Data Centre that for various technical and historic reasons require their own operating environment, while only consuming small amounts of CPU and memory resources. Solaris Containers could quite easily be used to move these environments onto a single server.

Of course Solaris Containers isn’t the only new addition in Solaris 10; Solaris Dynamic Tracing or DTrace is another potentially useful piece of software. According to Sun

"DTrace gives you performance and operating data on everything that goes on in your computer and allows you to pinpoint exactly where the bottlenecks are."

Assuming this software does what it says in the tin it could be a very useful tool indeed.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be looking further into the performance, security and availability benefits of Solaris 10 and will post what I find here.

I am confident that it won’t be long before Solaris 10 is running on a customer LMS. If you’d like to be involved let me know.

Posted by Jim Prince at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)