« Solaris 10 Investigation | Main
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.
- ICT departments are becoming increasingly involved in the tender process and each has their own favoured platforms.
- 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.
- This industry can be volatile; there are obvious risks from relying on a single supplier.
- 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.
- 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 April 29, 2005 08:25 AM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.talis.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/22