Can you tell why use SmartOS? And not just because the name has the cool, brilliant vibe associated with Apple. Apple only has that reputation because it marketed itself to the creative class that thinks it is smart. Starving artists carry it while thinking they are smarter and better than everyone else. Tell about SmartOS. I already know it is a Linux operating system.
You could use SmartOS for the esoteric value. I mean, it isn’t even in the top one hundred distributions, so you’d be an outlier even among Linux users. Smart OS is supposed to be the most advanced operating system in the world. I might give the IBM Big Blue or other super computers that title.
It is designed for data centers. SmartOS is based on the OpenSolaris technology, with KVM virtualization by Linux, so it should work on data centers. SmartOS creates a multi-tenant environment for running data centers on. That’s kind of the intent for a data center, unless you are supporting a data center for a single large company – and even then, you may want separate partitions for customers accessing data versus internal data or test servers separate from production.
SmartOS is ultra-reliable. Most Linux versions are. Zorin is one of the best, Debian in the middle, CentOS and Slackware toward the bottom. SmartOS is open source. So are a lot of Linux OS versions. Ubuntu paired up with Amazon, Red Hat is already commercial and I don’t remember which one is supported by Novel.
SmartOS has double hulled virtualization to add additional layers of security. Debian achieves that to a degree just by its challenging process to update and change configurations.
Then again, it is so hard to change that it stays stable, too. SmartOS has the ZFS file system to protect integrity. Ah, but do they still make it easy to wipe out your data if you don’t set up the partition right during upgrade?
I hated that with Debian and a few other OS. SmartOS has fair share scheduling and CPU caps to ensure fair access to all tenants. That does make it one of the few Linux versions with those tools built in. If
I wanted a community organized OS, I’d be asking about CentOS. And as with all communist projects, you only pretend to pay them, so they only pretend to work, and you only once in a while get a useful update out of the team.
SmartOS uses Dtrace for dynamic tracing for easy troubleshooting. That’s where the term Dtrace comes from. And easy tracing of actions and system responses doesn’t necessarily resolve the problem, only gives you the ability to determine the likely source.
What then do you think of SmartOS? Smart OS has all the tools you need to run a full data center with Linux, without the costs of a RedHat implementation. How well it performs against Red Hat is to be determined, since it hasn’t yet had the history of major implementations like Red Hat..
