I would also argue that Solaris still has a strong presence in the enterprise space. There are plenty of tasks that are not suited to the relatively small foot-print of x86 equipment and require big-iron. Even Oracle RAC implementations that go the Linux route eventually find themselves with scaling issues due to I/O being the big bottle neck. It's great that x86 is pushing into multi-core and multi-threading heavily, but the rest of those servers are not well balanced. Realistically, most Solaris shops these days are handling more workloads, but with fewer physical servers. I've even seen large retail websites that use to be on Solaris x86 move back to Solaris SPARC and cut their server foot-print in half. As companies continue to grow in the IT space, the need for efficient and scalable servers will increase. Data center space and power are at a premium these days and it's getting harder to justify the x86 server sprawl that has eaten data center capacity up with the same level of insanity as storage as. It's pretty sad when a few HP x86 servers can max out the power and cooling capacity available in most data center cabinets. This is a growing issue, seeing data centers with 1/3 or 1/2 full cabinets with x86 gear. There is a growing trend for companies to look at performance, scaling, and power efficiencies. For many tasks, a T5220, T5240 or T5440 is an excellent choice for consolidating and keeping the TCO down. I can name dozens of major companies that depend on those servers for their web, app, and database tiers.
Linux isn't bad, it's just tied to an architecture that has to mature significantly and Linux still has major issues around backwards compatibility, upgrades, and consistency. Sadly, if Apple actually put more focus on their server line-up, I wouldn't see much point in Linux. With the decline of Novell and Red Hat growing its strangle hold on the Linux platform as a whole, I'm certain that in the next 5 years we'll all be talking about the next UNIX-like OS to come along and wipe it out of the data center. And by that time, Solaris will still be around handling the mission critical workloads. If Oracle plays its cards right, it should push everything onto Solaris and wipe Red Hat out completely. It wouldn't be a far stretch for Oracle to do that now that they have their own complete stack. Disrupting the Linux eco-system wouldn't be hard by pushing its client base onto Solaris and devaluing it's own Unbreakable Linux. Doing so would make the most sense for Oracle to cut its ties and dependency on Red Hat. Doing so would place enterprises in the pattern of going back to Solaris for all of their enterprise software stacks and make it an easy switch from Linux back to Solaris for everything else. This would play well into the direction of the CxO mind-share that is tired of complicated integration stacks that require large IT organizations to sort out. Oracle has the right idea of pursuing the concept of selling complete solution stacks. All Oracle really needs is a large cloud service for serving things up and clients will sign-up. Doing it yourself is fun for the IT folks and keeps them employed, but ultimately it's not the business of most companies. They'd rather sell their products and services without having to worry about IT stuff the way they do today. Bottom-line, Oracle has major plans for the assets they got from Sun, which includes Solaris. Keep in mind that Sun Oracle is still in the top 5 server manufacturers in the world for a reason:) People are buying the equipment! *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Edward Martinez <mindbende...@live.com> To: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Mon, September 6, 2010 2:04:38 PM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] OpenSolaris cancelled, to be replaced with Solaris 11 Express > 11. Solaris has a bright future. i don't think so. Linux has been running solaris out of the server rooms for a long time, that is why in 2005 SUN decided to open up solaris and give solaris away freely hoping that would attract customers. from 2005 -2009 things did seem more promising for solaris, then here comes Oracle reverts solaris back to that point in time when it begin to die. UNIX(solaris,aix,etc) sales are rapidly decreasing, a system running linux and nehalen is as good a sparc system. so I think if oracle continues managing solaris with it's current model the future will belong to linux and windows. With Linux around, I don't expect many customers are willing to pay the current prices for solaris contracts. quote: "n 2005, Sun released the source code to Solaris, described then as the company’s crown jewel. Why do this? The simplest answer is that Solaris had been losing ground to an open source competitor in Linux. Losing ground was a symptom of economics" http://dtrace.org/blogs/ahl/2010/08/27/the-future-of-solaris/ http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid80_gci1519243,00.html -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
