> From: [email protected] [mailto:opensolaris- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Gaiseric Vandal > > what is the > benefit of OpenSolaris for Oracle?
IMHO, it's as follows: Suppose you're a sysadmin. You've heard of ZFS, and you've heard it's cool. But you are running a business. You can't afford the risk of committing to switch over to a new system, without being *absolutely* certain it will do everything you need it to do. Oracle cannot take business away from netapp, unless they allow admins to try solaris/opensolaris/ZFS risk-free. Most admins also keep some infrastructure at home. So the natural path is: You build an opensolaris fileserver at home, you particpate in discussion forums and read all the documentation you can get your eyeballs on. You become familiar with, comfortable with, and impressed with the capabilities. And then you buy it at work to replace your old product. Because it's better. And another double-whammy: If you're new at this (and everyone is; it's a new technology), staking your career on a bold move at work, which are you going to buy? A generic unsupported server? Or the official blessed Sun server with platinum support? This official blessed server still costs the same or less than what you were going to buy from netapp anyway... So it's already in the budget ... You're not going to risk your neck, most likely, trying to build some non-sun branded server for your business and cut a couple thousand off the budget, without a safety net. Opensolaris helps Oracle sell both Sun Hardware and Solaris. Opensolaris gives Oracle a development platform to test and deploy experimental features (like dedupe) in an unsupported environment, to people who are enthusiasts and eagerly anticipating such new features, and willing to dig into problems when they find 'em. Make sure the technology is solid on real-world data in real-life usage scenarios, before they make a commercial supported product offering in solaris. Opensolaris reduces the development and verification cost of deploying solaris. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
