Oracle Shuts Older Servers Out of Solaris 11 203
PCM2 writes "The Register is reporting that Oracle has decided not to allow Solaris 11 to install on older Sparc hardware, including UltraSparc-I, UltraSparc-II, UltraSparc-IIe, UltraSparc-III, UltraSparc-III+, UltraSparc-IIIi, UltraSparc-IV, and UltraSparc-IV+ processors. The Solaris 11 Express development version released in November did not have this restriction, which suggests that the OS would likely run on these models. Unfortunately, the installer won't. All generations of Sparc T series processors and Sparc Enterprise M machines will be able to install and run Solaris 11, however."
Sounds like good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it will force companies to re-evaluate their position with Oracle, why Oracle is even relevant in today's market is still a mystery
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Because it will force companies to re-evaluate their position with Oracle, why Oracle is even relevant in today's market is still a mystery
We ARE talking servers from 2005-2007 here. Servers unlikely and unsuitable for production or any other professional use anyway.
Also, no end-of-support date for Solaris 10 has even been published yet.
Oracle is relevant since it still provides some advantages over the competition, no mystery there. However, I know what you mean. :-)
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Servers from 2005 to 2007 are unsuitable for production?
The usual life cycle for a server may be slightly longer than 4 years. When i worked in the computing center there were single solaris machines which had specific tasks which were about 10 years old, even the solaris terminal/web servers were in use for 6-8 years.
For a serious (not in terms of the size) database server i would hope that its possible to operate it for longer (but obvious that does not mean you need a new OS, if the old one is still patched).
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3, or at the most, 4 years is what at least I am used to, and AFAIK what most servers are specified to run reliably for.
Of course, one could run servers for longer than that if one wants to take some chances, however there are usually very small gains in doing that.
"Specific task" servers are typically virtualized, nowadays, so those barely exist.
Anyway, as I said, older servers can continue to run Solaris 10 if they want.
And if I were their operators I would not take the risk of doing major updates on the
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Some Webservers have uptimes of 4 years ... ! I would hope this not also the lifespan ..?!
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Thats the lifespan of the company owning the server
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Re:Sounds like good news (Score:5, Informative)
The University i studied at bought a (As far as remember, its the only system matching the spec which i remember) Ultra Enterprise 4000 in around 1996 or 1997.
Please direct your view to:
http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-os-337182.pdf [oracle.com]
So the regular supported time would have been 14 years and the extended supported time would have been longer.
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract.
So, you didn't have any "big iron" then?
Now since i'm sure Oracle doesn't sell support for this hardware anymore
They do.
I bet most companies have already shitcanned them or sold them off, so I bet this will only affect a minority at best. For those that are still running what is frankly in computing terms ancient hardware it isn't like there aren't free Linux distros that will run on these machines,
You want to run an unsupported, experimental port of Linux on an E6900, or an E10000, or an E20000?
and if you are so concerned about money you are running actual business on a server that old frankly I doubt you're gonna pay for an upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris anyway.
In this market (midrange servers), it's usually not about the money, but the supposed "stability". And, you wouldn't pay to upgrade, you've been paying premium software support to be able to run whatever version of Solaris is supported.
So I don't see this as any different than say MSFT saying they wouldn't support running Winserver 2K10 on a P4, since that is the age we are talking about here. I just don't see old servers getting expensive new OSes, that just wouldn't make any sense. Maybe someone can chime in here and say why they'd buy new server licenses to run on 6 year old tech?
Our company bought new UltraSparc III and IV servers (V215s, V445s) in 2008 (bad decision, I didn't support it). At the same time we bought Sun X4450 Intel-based servers. Guess which ones will still have a supported OS in 7 year's time? The cheaper ones with 4 times the cores.
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So, you didn't have any "big iron" then?
Well, *really* big iron servers are usually partially replaced to achieve longer lifetimes, so it is really a somewhat unfair comparison.
Anyway, If one runs a Sun Enterprise server, a major operating system upgrade late in the life of the server seems quite pointless as well. It sure doesn't add to stability.
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The reason that Sun failed is because they failed as at being a Dell or HP and sell cheaper x86 linux based stuff like Dell and HP does. Almost nobody needs an E10k, E15k, E25k, and most of the people that think they need one are wrong. Remember that compute capacity goes up and power usage goes down, whereas the maintenance price of an E*k stays the same or goes up over time, and its relative computing power goes down.
Most everyone today does replication (optionally geographically as well) and hardware r
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No, absolutely. Please order a server from Dell (i mean, HP sell *serious* Servers) which should serve as the central file server for 10000s of users.
I think sun failed because they strayed from the path, namely to focus on a client-server architecture which avoids decentralized maintenance tasks.
When i worked with suns they had 2 or three major bonus points and none was related to price, all related to software features which reduced the TCO. It was easily possible to maintain a *lot* of machines for CIP p
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No, absolutely. Please order a server from Dell (i mean, HP sell *serious* Servers) which should serve as the central file server for 10000s of users.
At Fermilab, working on an LHC detector team, we had 5-10 Linux boxes doing distributed NFS, boxes that cost a couple hundred bucks a piece. They were serving 1000s of machines concurrently for file server purposes.
How many organizations are serving 10,000+ users from a central file server? Not that many. And if you are, you're going to cluster the fuck out of it for redundancy and scalability. Big Iron is dead. It was killed for Linux, with it's ability to run on damn near any x86 box, it's reliability, an
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The point is simple: CERN has so much experience in building networks that maintaining this that setting up a complicated, specific configuration is not a problem.
(Now dont tell me that the install of the distro helped you in setting up the distributed nfs)
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CERN had no responsibility in maintaing it whatsoever. It took 1-2 people to admin it, and it was only a small subset of their roles (and I was one of the people).
This isn't rocket science.
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Obviously you've never heard of PNFS before.
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"Start off with the man page and or help function, then go to the project website, if nothing there check some forums for the bleeding edge software, for mature software the man page, or a quick Google search will get you the answer you need"
I define mature software by "man page documents it". google searches are not allowed.
What i find with linux that the amount of non-mature SW in many distributions, which is included, is quite large IMHO.
the NWManager in Ubuntu is one of the worst examples, but there are
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Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract.
Thats because you think Dell sells 'Servers'.
Theres a difference between anything you buy from Dell and a 64 processor Sun cabinet, and part of that difference is 10s of thousands of dollars price difference. Oh and the Sun server was actually expected to last longer than the warranty on it.
Sadly, you don't seem to know what a 'big' server looks like. Let me give you one little hint, Microsoft doesn't sell software designed to run on a medium to large server. At best, even a big Windows install is still
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Re:Sounds like good news (Score:4, Insightful)
(but obvious that does not mean you need a new OS, if the old one is still patched).
I would rather strongly suspect that this will be the bigger factor in customer ire, or lack thereof. Given that SPARC gear has never been cheap, systems of that vintage still in operation were, presumably, purchased because there was some important task to be done that was done best on Solaris and/or SPARC. If that was a matter of performance, an upgrade to some newer hardware is likely in the cards. If it was a matter of specific application compatibility, they are unlikely to be switching OS versions until the present one loses support.
If 10 is supported for a nice long time, people likely won't care much. If they find that both their existing hardware and their existing software are being ditched, they will be Less. Happy.
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Considering that the UltraSPARC I is from 1995 we are talking about a range of machines far older than 4 years.
However I completely agree with yout :D I don't buy server to decomission it 4 years late, that makes no sense.
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Sure, 2005-2007 servers are suitable for production--just keep using the current Solaris 10 software. The real question is, "Should I deploy a new server, which typically runs for several years, based on obsolete hardware?"
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We ARE talking servers from 2005-2007 here. Servers unlikely and unsuitable for production or any other professional use anyway.
In some environments, the only reason SPARC boxes were bought was for their longer support lifetime (e.g. "minimum of 7 years support") than competing x86 models.
Since virtualising old installs is more difficult on Solaris for SPARC, I predict this will just accelerate migrations to x86, or for environments that need midrange servers, PPC or Itanium.
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Re:Sounds like good news (Score:4, Informative)
And what is with AS400 and RS/6000 / System p systems from IBM?
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If you had stated servers from 1995 to 1997 it would have made sense, but a server made in 1995 is modern enough for some tasks, and older servers are fairly common as test platforms for new application versions.
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older servers are fairly common as test platforms for new application versions.
This is the "shoot yourself in the foot" moment for Oracle. We MUST have test and dev servers running the exact same code and OS as the production servers. We can't afford to replace "everything" just because Oracle would like more money this quarter. Therefore, buh bye Oracle, would love to keep you around, but you MUST go now... Of all the ways I've seen to flush a company away, I guess this isn't the worst way to go.
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I am not of that conviction.
Running crappy old servers for development is, in my experience, really shooting oneself in the foot:
1. The costs of having an entire development department down even ONE day WAY overweights the cost of buying new servers.
2. Also, old production servers tend to be power-hungry, noisy monsters.
3. Slow development servers are crap, they:
3.1 Don't force anyone to optimize, talk about a myth. Optimization is done where it is needed, not everywhere. Slow algorithm and normal common se
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However running tests on older hardware do make sense since it makes sense to have isolated hardware that can be moved around. Not all software testing is standalone, some incorporates interaction with other machinery etc. and re-using older machinery for various kinds of tests is a cheap way to keep things running and stick to the budget. And test machines are usually re-installed several times so if it dies then you won't lose much.
It seems to me that you haven't really been involved in the process of tes
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We have here some Sun Fire V440s which top list of the problem-free servers. Those are SPARC IV chips and they work and run fine since the
Oldest Sun server we had IIRC was ~12yo and it was recycle simply because per chance it was noticed that (1) Sun stopped support for the server few years ago (that was me who noticed that) and (2) several business critical apps still ran on the server. (Can't tell you the model number because nobody from IT could recall it.) At least in the past, one has expected 10 y
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:4, Informative)
We ARE talking servers from 2005-2007 here.
The V490, V890, E6900, E20000, E25000 stopped shipping in April 2009 [blogspot.com]. The V445 is Ultrasparc IIIi, was announced in 2007, I think first shipped in 2008, with Solaris 10. So it won't even make *one* OS upgrade?
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Ok. I would think that we are talking about a very small minority. I suspect that very few machines were sold that late.
I would also wager that Oracle/Sun has been in contact with most of their enterprise customers before making this decision.
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, but if you upgrade your 2005 era server to newer hardware, you have to lube up for what your new Oracle license for the more powerful hardware is going to cost you. And if your server from that era is fast enough for running a small database, why go through all that pain?
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In the real world this is not happening. Newer OSes usually run faster ... especially on older hardware. This slow down thing only happens on windows.
Sun hardware is loved in big business because certain software like the Oracle Database or SAP R4 etc. can be very good finetuned to run pretty fast on SPARC. SPARC architectures scale nicely, double the cores and you nearly double the power.
We are talking here abo
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:4, Interesting)
We ARE talking servers from 2005-2007 here. Servers unlikely and unsuitable for production or any other professional use anyway.
We aren't talking just servers, but also workstations. A workstation from 2005 is not old or unsuitable in any way. Universities and workplaces which went Solaris rather than Windows back in the 1990s may have plenty of them.
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Oracle is relevant since it still provides some advantages over the competition
At this point, the only actual advantage Oracle has is that some apps are built entirely around Oracle and are non-trivial to port to a new system.
They have no other actual advantage, unless you call working with software that still thinks working with it should be just like the experience was in the 70s an advantage.
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This is probably one of the changes, but Sun had a 15 year lifecycle for hardware vs 5 years for Dell equipment (for example). It was a benefit for purchasing Sun equipment. We're still running T2000's here at work and they run fine. Heck, we didn't upgrade the hardware because Oracle raised the prices on multi-core Sun Ultra chips. But they're still chugging along working fine.
[John]
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Because it will force companies to re-evaluate their position with Oracle, why Oracle is even relevant in today's market is still a mystery
Because if you need Oracle, you need Oracle. What I do wonder is why so many that don't need Oracle use it, because it's a beast in every way. Even if I went all big and enterprisey I think the costs of running two database systems is lower than trying to be an all-Oracle shop.
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And when would that be the case now, at 2011? Most sites I see Oracle running use it because they needed Oracle at the past (and once you start with Oracle you just can't stop anymore), or because "Well, nothing compares with Oracle" while they use bad practices to go around Oracle's licensing and would be better serverd even by MySQL. From 2006 to now I've just never saw a site that needs Oracle, and I simply don't know of any exclusive feature of Oracle that
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There are plenty of scenarios where MySQL is utterly useless and inapprobriated.
The question whether you can use a low end DB basically comes down to how many concurrent write transactions you have.
MySQL is cool if you only serv stuff (like wikipedia), but not if you have several 1000 open write transactions all the time.
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:4, Interesting)
No mystery to large enterprise database users. Oracle absolutely trounces every other DBMS out there for large BW applications in terms of performance and scalability, and naturally it performs best on Solaris.
Don't bother pointing out the M$ funded benchmarks that claim SQL Server out performs it, I've seen them and I don't buy it (actually, I haven't seen these in a while - could be that M$ has given up on that battle).
The organizations I work with have large farms of both SQL Server and Oracle DBMS systems. Both have their own teams of DBAs constantly working to optimize these systems, so both are tweaked for max performance. The fact is for the really large DBs Oracle is the only choice as the difference in performance between SQL Server and Oracle is not even close. As an example, I recently worked on a project that migrated a large DB from SQL Server to Oracle (the SQL Server team could not get it to perform well enough to satisfy the requirements). One of the queries (multi-table join on tables with one table containing billions of rows) that ran for 2-3 hours in SQL Server runs in under an hour on Oracle (on roughly equivalent hardware).
What is a mystery to me is why they run SQL Server at all. Maybe because M$ is cheaper? I don't usually deal with purchasing so I don't know the relative costs, but my experience in a recent engagement I had with a small shop installing SQL Server clued me in on how expensive Sql Server is. It might well be cheaper than Oracle, but it's by no means cheap.
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What is a mystery to me is why they run SQL Server at all. Maybe because M$ is cheaper?
1. Yes, it is cheaper, I would say. But not that much anymore. Mostly because Oracle has become cheaper.
2. Oracle has a steeper learning curve, installation and initial configuration is a bit more difficult.
3. Less people know Oracle than MSSQL. This is a big thing.
4. Performance is usually less of an issue, normally, a basically-tuned SQL server will suffice.
And last, SQL server isn't complete crap anymore. It has actually gotten quite a bit better over the years.
Strange thing, though, the management tools
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As i recall, Oracle actually runs somewhat better on Linux than it does on Solaris...
And while Oracle may be better than the competition for very large applications, it is often used for much smaller applications and while technically it's perfectly capable, financially it's completely unsuitable.
As for why places run MSSQL, its about marketing and fear of the unknown... The people who set that up probably didn't know anything other than MS, and certainly were not technically skilled enough to choose the be
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"Oracle absolutely trounces every other DBMS out there for large BW applications in terms of performance and scalability, and naturally it performs best on Solaris."
Yet, the largest databases I've ever met run on hightly distibuted DBMS, what Oracle just can't do. Oracle is used at "millions of people data" applications, where people have the option of just buying a few big machines and using them, while the "hundreds of millions of people data" applications need some serious support from software.
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why Oracle is even relevant in today's market is still a mystery
Because of Oracle EBS? Maybe that, and other stuff. built on Oracle keeps people vendor locked into Oracle?
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Oracle wants old SPARC customers to upgrade... (Score:2, Insightful)
... but they can lose them.
Currently, Linux x86-64 offerings are cheaper and faster than Oracle SPARC Servers, and Dell and RedHat will welcome their money to make the migration.
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... but they can lose them.
Currently, Linux x86-64 offerings are cheaper and faster than Oracle SPARC Servers, and Dell and RedHat will welcome their money to make the migration.
Oracle are pushing sun customers onto their upgrade treadmill. The smart ones will see this coming and jump ship right away, the stupid ones will be bled dry.
What oracle is doing to sun is a tragedy but sun has run its course. Oracle brought sun knowning it was a company with a dim long term future.
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Oracle are pushing sun customers onto their upgrade treadmill. The smart ones will see this coming and jump ship right away, the stupid ones will be bled dry.
'Tis called insight [despair.com]
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Lose who? Why are people who don't upgrade for years still considered customers?
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Yes, they are still customers because
A) The reason they paid 5 times as much for your hardware up front was to get 3 times the life out of it.
B) They still pay for support
C) They still buy new hardware since they want stuff that works well with their existing machines and as a migration path for old services.
You're an idiot if you think someone stops being a customer the instant they've paid you for a server and aren't buying new ones.
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Yep. Just like Linux wants people to upgrade from ISA when the 3.0 kernel is released.
Computer company considers old hardware obsolete. News at 11.
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Not Nice to Emerging Markets (Score:2)
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Planned Obsolescence in hindsight. This may not seem a big deal in the USA....We need to stop seeing support of legacy tech purely through the eyes of rich nations.
And we need to stop expecting companies to support unbearably-old platforms with new software, handicapping the new environments, when those older pieces of hardware can continue to run the older software successfully.
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Just stick with the 2.6.x kernels and you should fine. Don't expect the world including Linux kernel 3.x to keep supporting your older hardware.
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Thats fucking funny.
Its absolutely hilarious as 'it still supports all my old hardware' is one of the Linux Standard Battlecrys.
You guys can't even keep your own fanboying straight anymore.
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To be fair. The 2.4.x kernel was supported for a very long time, and I don't see 2.6.x kernel being abandoned anytime soon. I hear rumors that there won't be any backports to 2.6.x kernel, but I put it in the bullshit category since people like me can't leave the 2.6.x series because we have to support the PC104 standard which uses ISA. I plan on continuing to maintain the board support packages for this kernel series, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
So in reality, the linux supports my old hardware "bat
Another brick in the wall. (Score:2)
Oracle has been alienating its customer base (particularly small to mid-level organizations) since they acquired Sun. Our university (mid-size 'business,' fairly large university) is jettisoning Oracle as a hardware/software platform, and I know other organizations that have already done so. Previously we were Sun/Oracle across the board, hardware (including SAN), software, and DB. While our hardware refresh cycle wouldn't be hurt by this decision, I can easily see many organizations which would be hampered
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Oracle has been alienating its customer base (particularly small to mid-level organizations) since they acquired Sun. Our university (mid-size 'business,' fairly large university) is jettisoning Oracle as a hardware/software platform, and I know other organizations that have already done so. Previously we were Sun/Oracle across the board, hardware (including SAN), software, and DB. While our hardware refresh cycle wouldn't be hurt by this decision, I can easily see many organizations which would be hampered to adopt new functionality in perfectly functional hardware. Adieu, Oracle, adieu.
I was instrumental in getting my old university to start moving off *both* HPUX and Solaris while a student worker in the sysadmin group 5 years ago: I didn't expect Sun to be bought-out, I just expected it to die, but either way - Sun is gone, and Oracle's acquisition and recent activity against other platforms (HPUX comes to mind) shows that Larry's got his eyes on one thing ... money, and taking everything he can from his customers along the way.
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A couple of years ago an actual Oracle employee told me that Oracle stands for "One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison".
Given that he was about to tell us how much something cost, I found the joke rather on point. I know lots of people who suddenly found themselves with older Sun equipment which wasn't on a maintenance program which suddenly didn't have access to update
And Then There's IBM: They Get IT (Score:5, Informative)
Alternative OS for SPARC (Score:3)
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The point might be that your customers may look at the systems you sold them as "fully supported platforms" just a few years ago and discover that they are suddenly *not* what you told them they were. And they may look at other platforms. Especially customers who over-bought into Oracle.
Money. Always. (Score:2)
I once quadrupled the pricing of one of our services. Yes we lost more than half of our customers, but were making more money while doing less work. It's not unlike Apple's strategy.
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Might work in the short term, especially if lots of your customers are locked in and have no choice...
But it won't help you get any new customers, and the ones you already have will gradually drop off.
Not even shipping yet... (Score:2)
All this complaining for an OS that isn't even shipping yet. This news tidbit is for a developer's preview drop.
USI - 1995
USII - 1997
USIIe - 1999
USIII - 2001
USIV - 2004
Is anyone really expecting to do an OS upgrade for these post 2011? Really?
Apple was worse (Score:2)
Last Apple PowerPC machines shipped in 2006
Snow Leopard shipped in 2009 without PowerPC support.
So Apple didn't release a new OS for machines that were 3 years old. The Sun machine impacted by this are probably 10 years old on average. Yeah, the fact that old hardware was still supported by Solaris 10 was neat but try putting Solaris 10 on some of that old hardware and using something like JDS or ZFS, it's painfully slow.
Solaris 11 hasn't even shipped yet. Add in the fast that most enterprises don't upgrade
Processor architecture differences... (Score:2)
The unsupported processors all have virtually indexed caches. This isn't in the new processors or x86 and due to the architecture of a new virtual memory subsystem due to land in Solaris 11 it would be a bitch to write a workaround. The old procs are all EOL anyway!
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NEWS FLASH!
BUSINESS SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON REPEAT CUSTOMERS. ENFORCED OBSOLESCENCE WILL MAKE PEOPLE GO ELSEWHERE, LIKE A COMPETITOR. LIKE IBM IN THIS CASE.
It's not as if Solaris support is free, ya know. They make money even on the old equipment. This is just Larry being a dick.
One of the reasons for buying Sun equipment in the first place, and paying for the premium over generic white box equipment, was its longevity. If this is no longer the case and the customers are forced on an upgrade path, why stay
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IBM is going to love this.
I just hope they'll be going to love Java strong enough to take it before Larry goes busted.
Java (Score:3)
IBM has it's own JVM implementation, which is fully compliant to the Sun Java specs, so it's safe from patent lawsuits. I don't see how much more they could "love" Java.
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IBM has it's own JVM implementation, which is fully compliant to the Sun Java specs, so it's safe from patent lawsuits. I don't see how much more they could "love" Java.
Owning the Java specs and stewarding the JCP. If not IBM, maybe Google (even Larry will make Google pay through the nose for them).
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NEWS FLASH!
BUSINESS SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON REPEAT CUSTOMERS. ENFORCED OBSOLESCENCE WILL MAKE PEOPLE GO ELSEWHERE, LIKE A COMPETITOR. LIKE IBM IN THIS CASE.
It's not as if Solaris support is free, ya know. They make money even on the old equipment. This is just Larry being a dick.
One of the reasons for buying Sun equipment in the first place, and paying for the premium over generic white box equipment, was its longevity. If this is no longer the case and the customers are forced on an upgrade path, why stay with Sun/Oracle equipment when there is a supplier that will actually do long-term support? IBM is going to love this.
--
BMO
Larry doesn't make money despite being a dick. He makes money by being a dick. He saw Sun's behavior not being dickish enough, and decide to arbitrage it.
Paraphrasing Steve Jobs, for Sun (now Oracle) to win, IBM doesn't have to lose. In this case, the customer can lose instead!
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Larry is losing customers year after year, they just keep charging the ones that are really completely locked into Oracle more and more.
Oracle has no software advantage over the competition anymore, the only thing they offer that other vendors don't is the name Oracle and a little less effort porting old databases to new versions of Oracle. The lock in of massive systems that are built around Oracle is the only thing that keeps them alive. They offer an inferior product to the competition in every way. I
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Ahh, the common excuse given for whenever Mozilla fucks someone over.
Also, your point doesn't really hold - I have invested time and money in plugin development, and many of the plugins I use myself haven't don't work elsewhere.
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Ahh, the common excuse given for whenever Mozilla fucks someone over.
Also, your point doesn't really hold - I have invested time and money in plugin development, and many of the plugins I use myself haven't don't work elsewhere.
Developers are always being screwed over. End users invested very little. I think they've lost the plot at Mozilla. Version 2 was probably the pinnacle. They lost me with Awfulbar.
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And, Sun was a server company.
Which means that people who were using their machines for completely different things than databases, are now more or less getting screwed out of newer functionality on older hardware.
Some older Sun machines are still fairly big boxes, and could likely keep with the new OS.
I think it's mostly the clients of Sun
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Yes. Firefox costs nothing, every platform on which version 4 ran is also supported by 5, Firefox is seldom mission critical software
I think you vastly underestimate the number of companies who use mission critical software via a browser these days, which makes the browser mission critical. Just like a server isn't much use if the app is fine but the OS is broken.
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And why is the upgrade from firefox 4.0.1 to firefox 5.0 so much harder than the move from 4.0 to 4.0.1?
Both are minor updates, and both bring security updates... If your complaining that 4.x won't have security updates, then surely that means you were actually planning to install such updates as/when they came out... So why not just install 5 instead of 4.0.2?
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The idea is that you trust some to make a security ONLY or bug fix ONLY patch that is unlikely to break existing functionality as the changes SHOULD ONLY BE VERY MINOR fixes, not feature or API changes.
Mozilla has said 'we're not supporting any sort of stable target, we will be intentionally breaking things in every single release we make, with no regard for what affect that will have on you, you must patch all of your websites to work with our NEW AND EXCITING bugs after every release we make if you want t
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Yeah, and Oracle's database on top of that. In reality, most companies don't actually NEED to upgrade to Solaris 11 to begin with, so it is kinda moot to begin with. The only real issue to me is the policy itself, Oracle being ham-fisted with their customers and forcing them to upgrade more often. Might be a good time for companies to consider migration away from all Oracle products.
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You don't run Linux on Sun equipment. Especially Sparc.
You don't know what I went through when I tried going through the (flawed) Gentoo-on-Sparc instructions and install. You get a system that builds itself for a week, chroots out, attempts to reboot, and becomes unbootable to the point where it will no longer recognize the disks. Thank gawd for little miracles and Sun's boot ROM and the built in dd to nuke the first 1000 blocks.
Linux on Sparc? Not if it's Gentoo. Don't do it.
--
BMO
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Worked great the time I did it with Debian and because Sparc is little endian some buggy software will hard crash on it rather than corrupting memory so it made a great testing box for some of my C software.
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correction: Sparc is Big endian
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The people who donate systems to the PostgreSQL buildfarm [postgresql.org] go out of their way to include some weird architecture/compiler combinations whenever possible for this same reason. Some of the bugs that show up on these platforms more spectacularly exist on the most popular AMD64 version, too, they're just harder to come across. Processor diversity is great for flushing out some types of subtle bugs.
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That was sun4c (sparcstation 2 era hardware)...
Sun4m and newer hardware (sparcstation 5, 10, 20, ipx etc) was fine.
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Re:OpenSolaris, Linux & BSD (Score:4, Informative)
There is no more OpenSolaris; Oracle already kicked that project in the nads back in August. You might use the derived OpenIndiana [wikipedia.org] distribution instead, but there's a whole different path to uncharted territory.
Basically this means everyone on older hardware will be stuck with Solaris 10 on it until they can plan a migration to something else, probably a whole new server running Linux instead. After all, what kind of idiot would make the mistake of buying new Sun hardware now that they've seen how things are going to work? All of the database server customers I deal with are replacing what used to racks full of Sun boxes running Solaris with Dell + Linux as fast as they can afford to replace the hardware. And my PostgreSQL conversion business is really picking up too. Go Oracle!
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People running solaris machines that cost multiple 100s of thousands of dollars which power the applications that ARE their business ... aren't using cracked OSes to do it on.
They will however begin the long task of not using Sun or Oracle products anymore, and while Oracle will rape them for a few years, after that few years is up, Oracle will have fewer customers than they did before they bought out Sun, all paying them less money as they will be working their way away from Oracle to avoid this sort of sh