Next Solaris prepped for 2011 The words "OpenSolaris" did not pass his lips once during Oracle's systems strategy update, executive vice president John Fowler in charge of server and storage did talk a little bit about the future of Oracle's Solaris Unix variant. It has been more than five years since Solaris 10 was launched, and Fowler said that next year …
RIP OpenSolaris.... :-(
I, for one, don't welcome our over-engineered, big iron supporting, probably ridiculously complicated for no good reason, Oracle labelled overlords.
And there was x86 Solaris 2.6 and probably later versions. OK, not x64, but at that stage I don't think there were 64bit intel CPUs. So your comment about sol9 and x86 is like saying the lack of petrol powered horses before the model T Ford was due to the oil industry wanting to sell big iron.
In late 1998, I picked up a set of freeware CD-ROMs for Solaris, the package said the software was for 2.5.1 and later and contained both SPARC and x86 binaries. Since Sun sold a 386 based workstation in the late 1980's, I'd suspect that x86 support started much earlier than 2.5.1.
One benefit to supporting both x86 and SPARC is that porting between platforms will uncover a lot of subtle bugs - much the same reason that the OpenBSD developers keep support for a lot of platforms.
Virtual Box got a version update August 6th so that seems alive and kicking. I would be interested to see how far ZFS has advanced from the last version of OpenSolaris, especially if dedup is an option. It seems a great idea but would not want to be the first one to deploy it on a critical system. Also will it use IPS (Image Packaging System) which has raise a lot of discussion on Open Solaris.
I work for a 'big name' company, one with a lot of servers. The company is very conservative about new technology, but some systems are starting to be replaced with Linux even here (it's taken this long). Our new database servers are going Linux because Sybase is cheaper on that platform, and when we build our new network next year (ish), the likelyhood is that Solaris will indeed be 'out the door'.
It not just here, a friend of mine who works in the city has informed me that Solaris is now on their 'restricted' list, which means buying no more of it, in favour of Linux and AIX.
I'm struggling to see a future for Sparc/Solaris except for black box Oracle solutions.
max allan - If you read between the lines of what Fowler said, opensolaris won't be dead it'll only be available as a preview of solaris 11 to 'enterprise' customers or folks who pay for the privilege. This big and paying customer preview program will shape the end product as many enterprise shops likely won't be that enthusiastic with the current limitations of IPS and AI.
It's not dead, just no longer open in the sense that it was originally conceived. Unfortunately, I think this will not be as smart a move as they hope it is. It could go the way of Tru64, another unfortunate casualty of M&A as it still exists, but only in small niches.
AC - I'm hearing and seeing a lot of the same accelerated migration plans away from solaris/sparc. There are plenty of companies who will be hogtied and won't have a choice but to stick with the oracle stack, but it does seem like those who do have a choice are jumping ship.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
