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Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

 
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Maaz
Valued Contributor

is linux stable/reliable enough ?

Dear Experts

is linux as stable/secure/reliable as HP-UX/IBM-AIX/Sun SOLARIS/SGI IRIX ?

Regards
Maaz


12 REPLIES 12
Stuart Browne
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

This is going to be one of those questions where everybody has a different view.

In some ways, the big-boys have it easy. They only develop for 1-2 platforms (HP-UX is only on PARISC and IA64, AIX is only on MIPS and Power, Solaris is only on SPARC (and i386 if you want to dredge up history), IRIX is only on MIPS). They also have dedicated programmers sitting there doing nothing but their Unix.

Linux however is developed a very dedicated group of volunteers, with the help of some corporate sponsorship (HP, Dell, IBM, SuSE, Redhat, Novell, etc. etc.).

The very in-house-ness, coupled with the sheer age of the Big Boys is what helps them be so stable and reliable.

Linux is still a snot-nosed little kid compared.

But this little kid has some serious game.

Security wise, it has most of the features on offer from the Big Boys, as well as a few new ones (SELinux) of which allow for extremely fine control of resources (including file system, sockets, pipes, etc.). This can make it a very tight ship if you spend the time to configure and tailor it all. There still isn't any simple and 'neat' way to do all of that.. Yet..

Reliability wise, for everything I do with it, it's more than reliable enough! Most of the servers I run have 293 days uptime (that's simply because they're 294 days old). And these things are on the front-line, getting clobbered by Internet users!

Do they have the ability to outweigh a mission-critical back-end server? Well, possibly not quite yet. For almost anything else? Yeah, they're reliable enough.

But it really does depend on your update policy, and on which distribution you use.
One long-haired git at your service...
Bill McNAMARA_1
Honored Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

I'm working on products based on RHEL 3.0 and RHEL 4.0 Enterprise Linux. I've seen very good reliability on U2 U5 and U6 versions of 3.0ES. Critical telecoms application have been running on certain nodes (clustered) for more than a year without any interaction.

Goes without saying that for mission critical applications you should always consider a failover/backup node - even with hp-ux and other unixs.

Bill
It works for me (tm)
Huc_1
Honored Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

Do not know if i could be considered as an "expert", as i am still learning every day, and have been working with various OS/architecture for more or less 25 years.

In the "Unix" world I would have to answer Yes , some distribution of the Linux kernel are as stable/secure/reliable as HP-UX/Sun Solaris/SGI IRIX, i am thinking of RedHat Gnu/Linux distributions here (or distribution based on redhat like "Centos"),Suse is probably also in this category, But I have not used this for a long while.

And as mention by Stuard Browne SELinux make this very solid ..but still a little hard to setup

I found that most gnu/linux I have installed worked with have performed well and have been
reliable/stable easy to maintain, update, migrate and monitor.

But if pushed to make a choise on OS I would go OpenVMS !, but this is not "UNIX".

Jean-Pierre Huc
Smile I will feel the difference
Steven E. Protter
Exalted Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

Shalom,

As stable as HP-UX. No.

It can do more things than HP-UX because more apps run on it. Used carefully it can be as stable as needed for the Enterprise.

The quality assurance of the various distributions need work.

Given a choice I still like to recommend HP-UX. But money often dictates Linux and its good enough for many uses.

SEP
Steven E Protter
Owner of ISN Corporation
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http://hpuxconsulting.com
Sponsor: http://hpux.ws
Twitter: http://twitter.com/hpuxlinux
Founder http://newdatacloud.com
Heironimus
Honored Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

The OS is pretty close, but the PC hardware you normally run Linux on is really not up to the standard of UNIX hardware from the big vendors. However, you can buy a whole lot of Proliants for the price of one HP9000.

I've also noticed that the Linux distributions certified by big software vendors like Oracle and IBM sometimes have unacceptably poor quality control.

My recent experience has been that availability is more often limited by the applications you host than by the OS and hardware. Hardware and operating systems keep getting better, but somehow applications keep getting worse....
Court Campbell
Honored Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

Yes Linux is stable/reliable enough. The real question is, "is the hardware stable/reliable enough?" The other O/S's you mentioned, except for Solaris, run for the most part on proprietary hardware. When you have a well defined set of hardware to run on you usually have less trouble. The engineers and developers can dedicate time to developing for a well defined set of hardware. Where as with Linux you can run on multiple platforms and use any number of hardware configs. This can cause issues at times.
"The difference between me and you? I will read the man page." and "Respect the hat." and "You could just do a search on ITRC, you don't need to start a thread on a topic that's been answered 100 times already." Oh, and "What. no points???"
Maaz
Valued Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

thanks for super/nice comments/views/explanations.

I'll welcome more
points assignment will be on MONDAY ;)

Regards
Maaz
Yogeeraj_1
Honored Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

Hi,

Depending on the flavour of Linux you plan to install, the answer may vary. Because we have so many flavours that run on so many different platform, it is even more difficult to answer.

But REDHAT and SUSE have been offering very stable Linux versions for the Enterprise. Redhat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server is a robust linux solution that is available for IBM and well as HP platforms.

The fear of not having proper drivers etc is quasi-inexistant.

In such cases, you must not consider Linux as being inferior to the major OSes that you have mentioned above.

Kind regards
yogeeraj
No person was ever honoured for what he received. Honour has been the reward for what he gave (clavin coolidge)
dirk dierickx
Honored Contributor

Re: is linux stable/reliable enough ?

From most of the replies you'll find that Linux is considered stable.

Now there are 2 big hurdles you need to think about:

- is your HW good enough? those Unix boxes with most of the time are pretty well build. while most intel boxes are built to be as cheap as possible (certain brands come to mind).
the reasoning here is to have many cheap boxes and thus provide high availability that way. this strategy does not work for every app.

- is the _software_ good enough? really important! if you're going to use commercial software not included in your distro be sure to check out how stable that software is on Linux. Too many times they release sloppy unix-to-linux ports that crash all the time. sure the OS keeps running, but the application is down all the time.

This last issue is important! mostly when you read in the press that some linux migration didn't work out and they are dissing linux 90% of the time it was the application running on it that was causing the problems.