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."
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).
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:3, Interesting)
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 them anyway, since 10-year servers often run old software rely on stuff that is likely to have changed in later operating system versions.
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?
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.
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.