One of the asides I cut from my recent entry about Solaris iSCSI support was a comment that while Linux iSCSI support also has its flaws, I expect better from Solaris. It's worthwhile to expand on why this is the case.

(It's not because we pay Sun for Solaris; after all, the university pays Red Hat too, for RHEL (which may wind up being our preferred server Linux; we are not too happy with Ubuntu 6.06 LTS).)

Fundamentally, it is because we have no compelling inherent reason to run Solaris instead of Linux. Thus, if Solaris is merely on par with Linux, there is no reason for us to use it; if we are going to use Solaris, it needs to exceed Linux.

(This is especially the case because there are a number of areas where Solaris is inferior to Linux, for example in driver support. And we have compelling reasons to run Linux; for example, our users are interested in various bits of software that runs first and best on Linux.)

You can argue that we could and should use Solaris even if it is on par with Linux, since there are some areas where it handily beats Linux. Unfortunately, running an additional operating system is non-trivial extra work, and the areas that Solaris beats Linux in only really count if they address problems that we're encountering.