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, 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: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?
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!
And Then There's IBM: They Get IT (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sounds like good news (Score:4, Informative)
And what is with AS400 and RS/6000 / System p systems from IBM?