Peter- Believe it or not, this is a question I have been pondering ever since I left Sun in 2005- how can Solaris, with its many winning attributes (open source, reliability, security, wealth of services, etc.) be turned into a viable competitor to Microsoft Windows Small Business Server?
Part of my motivation for pondering that question is that I found myself in a small company (~100 people) that had, years ago, standardized all their administration applications onto Windows servers (happily all the development was done on Linux, so they're still in business...). The problems of securing and administering a group of Windows machines to provide Active Directory, Email, and Access (for an in-house ERP system) was crushing - they had an IT director, a full-time DBA, and two contractors running pretty much full-time, and they were not getting ahead of the work. Needless to say, they had a lot of work all the time to fend off virus and malware attacks, keep the directories up-to-date, and try to optimize the configurations to allow for growth but not consume massive amounts of money. It has been my (limited) experience that, when one is starting a company, one comes to a time when you are sitting around with about 5 other people, and someone realizes that the group needs a server. Using your hotmail accounts and passing around USB disks to keep documents synchronized just ain't working. They look around; the CEO has a windows laptop, the operations person has a windows laptop, the finance person has a windows laptop. It's pretty clear that, whatever you get, it needs to play well with Windows (that engineering dude might be running Linux or something, and the marketing person might be running OS X, but nobody really understands what those guys are talking about anyway...) So the obvious decision is to get a Windows Small Business server. Dell will wrap one up and send it out the next day, might even finance it. We all know Windows, so we can set it up and run it ourselves, right? (an excellent post on this topic is here: http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=39163飻 ) Hey, it'll work great, 'cuz it's Windows, right? And for quite a while, it actually does. Whether they would have been wiser to have eschewed a server altogether and just used Yahoo small business services or Webex weboffice or even godaddy (I used Google Groups and Godaddy for my latest venture to get it up and running fast, and I have been very happy... of course, there's only two of us in the company, and we're separated by ~3000 miles) Indeed, there's only one thing that can go wrong: the business could (shudder) actually succeed and grow! And that's where my former employer found themselves. (to be continued...) This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
