Red Hat White Paper Sample

As a result of this analysis, RFG believes Linux provides benefits that outweigh those of commercial and open source versions of Solaris in most environments. Sun’s open source derivative of their flagship operating system, OpenSolaris, has thus far failed to gain significant community support and the product may be set adrift by Oracle once the merger is completed. Commercial Solaris (i.e., currently Solaris 10) versions remain a good choice where preexisting Solaris administrator skill sets, SPARC hardware, or Solaris-only applications are deployed. It may also be the right option where other strategic implications are involved, such as partnerships that the organization depends on.

Nevertheless, RFG believes Linux is a better choice for environments where commercial Solaris is not absolutely required, including new workloads, workload migrations, and hardware virtualizations and consolidations. In any environment that can benefit from hardware flexibility and the ability to choose among multiple distribution and support vendors for a product, Linux provides a number of advantages, and RFG believes this describes most enterprise IT departments.