Comments on: RIP Solaris

By: Preston de Guise

Preston de Guise — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:35:19 +0000

Chris,

I’m glad to hear you’ve had a better experience.

I stand by my original assessment though: I’m seeing Solaris kicked out of every single educational facility I deal with. The long-term consequences of this are massive, and are being completely underestimated by Oracle.

I’m also starting to see many of my non-educational customers enacting policies to remove Solaris at the next refresh due to the unacceptably high increase in maintenance costs. Australian customers in particular seem quite unhappy with support under Oracle vs their prior support arrangements under Solaris.

Cheers,
Preston.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 21:26:19 +0000

I must say I completely disagree with this assessment. Solaris is still a very high quality product, and we use it exclusively in our organization for all Unix requirements. I’ve been a Solaris admin for 4 years, and plan to continue to do so for many years to come. I’ve had my complaints about Oracle support at times, and I do miss Sun. However, their support is just as good as EMC, Symantec, etc… that I’ve worked with. SPARC hardware is very high quality, and that’s what organizations are looking for. Fujitsu especially is an excellent vendor of SPARC/Solaris hardware.

By: iTWire – Aussie storage growth above average: Gartner | The NetWorker Blog

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:33:44 +0000

[...] Since the Oracle acquisition of Sun, every single one of my customers who had previously been a large Sun customer has either been resolutely turning away from the vendor, or eyeing them with firm displeasure. Why? Oracle’s higher prices for maintenance and product has had a significant impact on the budgetary options available to one of Sun’s biggest previous customer bases – the educational market. (This, for what it’s worth, is why I penned the article last year, “RIP Solaris“.) [...]

By: Preston de Guise

Preston de Guise — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 20:59:30 +0000

Joel,

RedHat has been pretty popular up until this point. (I suspect a lot of organisations though that are cost-constrained may start looking at CentOS now that it’s officially supported by EMC as well.)

Cheers,

Preston.

By: Joel

Joel — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:23:35 +0000

Hey Preston,

Thanks for the recommendation! Are most using Red Hat or some other distro?

Thanks again!

Joel

By: Preston de Guise

Preston de Guise — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:54:59 +0000

Hi Joel,

These days NetWorker on Linux is getting pretty good. My primary concern remains that NetWorker on Linux works best when you can ensure that any Linux-connected tape library is FC-connected, or there’s a dedicated SCSI channel for the robot head, so there is no drive+head combination on a single channel.

Since some of my biggest customers run with Linux NetWorker servers, I feel comfortable recommending that as a stable platform these days.

Cheers,

Preston.

By: Joel

Joel — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:42:50 +0000

I’ve also all but decided to move away from Solaris as our Networker platform of choice, but I can’t decide if that means Networker is also gone or if we move to the less supported Linux platforms.

Joel

By: Nancy

Nancy — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 17:06:56 +0000

Hi Preston – Great blog!

I have been Networker vetran for over 15 years and a Solaris admin for more than that, the last ten years I have been supporting a Ivy League university. I have a couple of observations on Oracle killing the educational discounts.

You nailed the intent of the educational discounts – they were intended to get students to use and learn the equipment and software and bond with it so they would want to take it with them when they left the university. This was great 10 years ago for Sun but very few universities still have solaris at the “student” level. My school the Sun lab has been filled with commodity intel systems running some form of Linux for several years now. So unfortunately that ship has sailed and Mac and Linux are filling that gap.

Here we have been using the Educational discounts to fill our server rooms and research computing labs with Sun equipment at a VERY competatitve pricing. With that gone you are correct we will be focusing on AIX in the server rooms and Intel Linux in the labs. IBM and HP already have their sales force’s at the ready…. It’s unfortunate to see what will surely be the death of Solaris as the unix operating system of choice.

We have already started to look at what applications we are running that still require the Solaris/SPARC (not X86) operating system. I still have a few – as a matter of fact my Networker Server is still on Solaris/SPARC and I will be looking to migrate to a Linux based server – that decision is directly tied to Oracle’s announcement discontinuing the educational discounts. I’d love to see a blog posting on the ins and outs of converting your networker server to a new platform.

Thanks for all your great work on this blog.

Nancy

By: Joel

Joel — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:10:14 +0000

Great article, I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been a unix admin for 12 years now and almost exclusively on Solaris, but the recent decline in the quality of Sun support and the stated and unstated but apparent direction of Oracle has forced us to start looking for a different default Unix platform. My bet is that Red Hat will be the biggest benefactor from the change at Sun. Sad really… I used to like Sun as a company and loved all of there server products.

Joel