NEW POLL: What OS port should be next?

[phoenix]

Originally Posted by daimer77

I am almost sure the Redhat owns the majority of Zimbra, but how much influence they inforce in the business strategy of the ZCS only people inside can tell.

I think you're mistaken.

Zimbra, a privately held company, received $16 million in series A and B funding from investors Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Eric Hahn, former Netscape CTO.

from this article - I can't imagine where you got your information from.

[dijichi2]

Somehow I found it hard to see other good reasons avoidng the Solaris port.

But of course one have to respect their choice even if it happens to be based on business and competition perspectives.

I must say I find it very odd solaris isn't a Network Edition port, it's by far the most stable and supported unix, and generally the os everything is released for first. Things are changing though I guess and being a small company (so far!) they have to follow the demand. If it's all linux, it's all linux. I am still very surprised though.

I am almost sure the Redhat owns the majority of Zimbra, but how much influence they inforce in the business strategy of the ZCS only people inside can tell.

Is there any reason for saying this? As far as I know it's a privately held company with multiple VC backers.

[KevinH]

Originally Posted by daimer77

Somehow I found it hard to see other good reasons avoidng the Solaris port.

It's on our list but low in relative to other platforms. We've produced platforms in general order of commercial interest. If you or your company have interest in buying Zimbra on Solaris please contact the sales team. They keep a list of unsupported platforms and the $ that are hinging on those deals.

[ringnebula]

Originally Posted by KevinH

It's on our list but low in relative to other platforms. We've produced platforms in general order of commercial interest. If you or your company have interest in buying Zimbra on Solaris please contact the sales team. They keep a list of unsupported platforms and the $ that are hinging on those deals.

This could be a chicken-egg problem. You guys haven't marketed your product at the solaris crowd at all yet. The solaris crowd tends to be fairly anti-linux in my experience, so you might see little interest in your product based simply on that.

I'm sure that if you have perused any sun related newsgroups over the last 10 years (and I'm sure many of you have). you will have noticed that Rich Teer among others simply see no way but the solaris way and they are willing to pay for that way.

In my opinion, if you took the time to port zimbra to solaris and then marketed it against the bloated, confusing, generally poorly put together Java Enterprise System you may just do very well in a very wealthy market segment.

I appreciate Zimbra's interest in following the money, but sometimes you just have to take a risk. In my own experience Zimbra's product is, if nothing else, a more coherent product than any of Sun's offerings.

While I happily use the open source version of your product on linux boxen, I would be even more happy to use it on Solaris/SPARC. It would even be likely that I would purchase the network edition, at least the basic small-biz version.

[daimer77]

Originally Posted by phoenix

I think you're mistaken.
from this article - I can't imagine where you got your information from.

Hello Phoenix I was not trying to put the Zimbra team in a bad light or claiming untrue details. I don't remember exactly where I read Redhat had some involvements in Zimbra, but as said I am not sure but I just thought I read it somewhere in an IT news paper.

Anyway whatever reason Zimbra might have they still contribute to the opensource on the internet and they produce hell of a nice product available to anyone with some computer knowledge.

Personally I still believe the Solaris market is a huge market waitng for quaility collaboration software, but of course it would also require a lot investments into advertisings and PR in general.

Furthermore I would definitely try to set up a kind of cooperation with SUN and this way create a synergy effect leading to an all win situation.

Best regards, Daniel Mersebak

[illscientific]

I think buying sun hardware and paying for solaris is a waste of money in general, especially if you're running open source software. Hopefully Sun and solaris go the way SGI and irix (inst) have....

[ringnebula]

Originally Posted by illscientific

I think buying sun hardware and paying for solaris is a waste of money in general, especially if you're running open source software. Hopefully Sun and solaris go the way SGI and irix (inst) have....

Sun makes good hardware for the most part, both SPARC and x64. You don't pay for solaris actually, since it is free to use. In fact Solaris has been open-sourced in the recent past and is gaining a bit more of a following simply because of that. http://opensolaris.org

If Sun does go chapter 11 (not likely) it won't be for some time. Sun, unlike many of it's competitors has quite a bit of cash in the bank to use for investments or as a cusion if needed.

[Xao]

Originally Posted by illscientific

I think buying sun hardware and paying for solaris is a waste of money in general, especially if you're running open source software. Hopefully Sun and solaris go the way SGI and irix (inst) have....

While the first part of that statement may have been true 3-5 years ago, it's completely uninformed now.

The new Sun Fire Galaxy servers are an incredible value. I priced out an equivelant Dell server vs. the X2200 M2 with 2 x Dual core Opterons and the Sun came out more cost effective AND had the Lights Out Management board included.

I have to say, the iLOM board is incredible. I had used the old ALOM as part of a Netra X1 that I purchased when they first came out, and the new iLOMs on their x86 boxes is incredible. I love the fact you can get keyboard console access through web browser. You can change all your BIOS settings, everything. It's just like you are on the keyboard through a browser. You can even upload your own SSL certificates for it, power it on if it's powered-off, etc...

Anyways, you have another vote for porting Zimbra over to Solaris.

I have been following Zimbra for about the past 9-12 months or so, and as soon as you release a Solaris version, or if someone can figure out how to compile it, I'm replacing my current configuration on my x2200!

Thanks!

P.S. I agree with a post earlier, there is a large Solaris Admin following out there, that just don't believe any other *NIX is UNIX, next to Solaris. I don't want to hear or start a flame war, you have your beliefs, we have ours.

Thanks again!

[qu1j0t3]

Originally Posted by Xao

While the first part of that statement may have been true 3-5 years ago, it's completely uninformed now.

The new Sun Fire Galaxy servers are an incredible value. I priced out an equivelant Dell server vs. the X2200 M2 with 2 x Dual core Opterons and the Sun came out more cost effective AND had the Lights Out Management board included.

I have to say, the iLOM board is incredible. ...

Anyways, you have another vote for porting Zimbra over to Solaris. ...

Yes, Xao - you're 100% right.

Sun now has the best value hardware offering by a long shot - apart from competitive pricing and support plans, its AMD and SPARC servers are winning world records almost daily - and Solaris 10 has compelling features over the other possibilities. Anyone who believes otherwise hasn't done their research.

In fact ZFS was the killer feature for us - it has integrity guarantees nothing else can make. But there's also lightweight virtualisation, and the list goes on. We bought a couple of X2100s but the X2200 M2 is even nicer.

With respect to Zimbra, it's not an easy port, I've spent a few days working on a port to Solaris10/x86 and only got third party done (stalled at Ant for Zimbra itself). I hope I get a chance to work on that some more. The Zimbra build process needs some general polish, description and organisation however, it is a bit rough around the edges, or was, around revision 70 when I jumped in.

[Phred]

Originally Posted by marcmac

Enterprises, who are our target (remember, we're a company) aren't likely to deploy on gentoo.

I'm not voting for Gentoo (my current needs are FreeBSD, FreeBSD and 64-bit Suse 10.1), but I might as well mention that my previous employer ran all of their (many) production servers, except for a single Exchange server, on Gentoo. Their rationale was that, by using an internal build server, they could keep standardized builds of all of the software they needed on their servers, ready to deploy, such that they could have a new server up and running in about 20 minutes.