| I work in Enterprise resource planning (erp) space. Mostly peoplesoft. I'm around things like sap, jd edwards, oracle ebusiness / hcm cloud, rtc. Proprietary Unixes are frequent and have probably made up 75% of my career including current massive project. Note these are modern and up to date, usually purchased brand new for implementation project hardware and software, not inherited legacy stuff (which seems to set me apart from most respondents here) Several reasons but note I have very bottoms up perspective. 1. Support. I think this is the major thing. Having a reliable long term vendor with pricey well written steady support model is important to companies who use erp. 2. Related is perception and reality of stability. Aix on power is as proprietary as it gets. These things get rebooted once or twice a decade. Hardware upgrade to another frame is live migration through firmware. It is not fancy or pretty but God dammit baby it works. Perception is there too - that Linux scales well out but not up, that it's vendor support is not at same level, that it moves too fast and breaks things, etc. 3. Deals and contracts. There may be legacy hardware footprint or client may get package deal with application middleware database and hardware. My personal perspective? Proprietary Unix is ahead on internals, behind on shiny,boring and reliable. There's a lot to be said for distributed cheap boxes over proprietary big boxes. But I don't think modern SREs fully grok how much I never had to deal with hardware or OS issue or outage on these things. Anecdata sample size =1 + gossip, but it's just a very different mindset and, here's the trick, there's nothing inherently wrong with that mindset, even if it's not currently in vogue. I prefer to work with Linux for a few reasons, including shiny and resume-helpful, but honestly, from business / management perspective, a grouchy experienced aix sysadmin on Power stack makes my job a lot easier. Edit / p.s. Again these are modern os'es and support Gui and tunnelling.... But I don't think anybody ever uses them. The application stack running on top is certainly modern and gui/Web, but installing and supporting OS, database, middleware and apps is all cli, very obscure, very efficient, very powerful. |