Oversighting Title

A Linux stack on Solaris: Nexenta

February 05, 2008

I have to admit I've been somewhat skeptical about the actual uselfulness of OpenSolaris. Yes, Solaris is one of the most advanced operating system in the market with quite a huge installation base, but yet it was hard for me to see where OpenSolaris could acually fit in the open source landscape.
Some days ago I found project nexenta and I have to admit I'm impressed. Long story short, Nexenta is a comunity driven attempt to build around the open solaris kernel a nice Debian based environment... and it actually works pretty well.
Open Solaris is a very interesting product by itself, but until today I could not see how - in a world where application portability is by far more important than, say, a strong kernel - one could do without the entire Linux ecosystem.
You can maybe recompile any Linux application under OSX, but it makes no sense to do so: the same goes for Solaris.
Back to Nexenta, I have to admit that ZFS alone is worth the price of admission, allowing for transactional upgrades in a well-known Debian environment.
Next time you build any Debian (or Ubuntu, that is) based server, you should really consider Nexenta: performances are, according to my quick benchmarks, impressive, and you still are in the familiar and cost effective apt-get world.
As a side note, nexenta's commercial project (Nexenta Storage Appliance) seems very interesting too, able to run on stock hardware with all the power of ZFS and all the usual administration panels.

1 Comments:

  • Anonymous Fabio Pozzi
    At 6 February 2008 12:58  

    Maybe you have the chance to use the Linux software base also on Sun machines supported by OpenSolaris.
    This can be better than using the Linux-sparc kernel.
    Maybe Sun is thinkin' to invest some money in better integrating mysql with the linux environment and use this also on their platform.
    Or maybe studying for my last exams is driving me crazy :p

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