Last month, I have come across how to choose Unix, with which UNIX to choose, commercial UNIX, and open source UNIX, lets see how the “Brands of commercial UNIX“and “Brands of open source UNIX”.
Brands of commercial UNIX
Some of the most famous and widely used brands of UNIX include Sun’s Solaris and Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX.
Solaris is a binary-compatible operating system, which means that Sun have gone to some lengths to ensure that one version of their UNIX will run on all of their hardware. Solaris also features integrated Java support, although Java can be downloaded for any UNIX
distribution.
Sun also manufacture UNIX for Intel hardware as well as their own proprietary hardware.
By comparison, HP manufacture four different versions of their operating system, each fine tuned for a specific purpose. Hewlett Packard’s UNIX variants all support both RISC architecture and the new breed of Itanium chips from Intel.
Other commercial UNIX variants include IBM’s AIX and Silicon Graphics’s IRIX system.
Brands of open source UNIX
There are an increasingly large number of offshoots of open-source UNIX. However, two names are significant: BSD and Linux.
BSD UNIX is one of the oldest forms of UNIX in existence, and pioneered such technologies as the TCP/IP stack and virtual memory. It’s widely in use across the Internet as a web server.
Linux is a port of the UNIX kernel to i386 (Intel) hardware, and is one of the fastest growing and most widespread UNIXes in use today. In fact, some hardware vendors who traditionally developed proprietary UNIX systems now offer the choice of shipping their
hardware with Linux installed. For example, even though IBM have their own proprietary UNIX, they now offer the option of shipping their xSeries servers with Linux pre-installed.
As a conclusion on choosing Unix, UNIX comes in two main flavors: commercial and open source. The strength of commercial UNIX lies in its support and stability, while open source’s strength lies in innovation and portability. Well known commercial UNIXes include Sun Solaris and Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX. Well known open-source UNIXes include BSD and Linux.
