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Oracle Shuts Older Servers Out of Solaris 11
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."
Because it will force companies to re-evaluate their position with Oracle, why Oracle is even relevant in today's market is still a mystery
Corporation is in the business of making money!
- For more on this, we now go live to Tom. Tom, I understand you've talked to some suits over there. What's your take on this?
- Charlene, my mind is blown. They seem to have this idea that they aren't running a charity. Also, they say they to increase sales in order to continue funding development. I don't understand why they don't just get a bailout from the government.
... but they can lose them.
Currently, Linux x86-64 offerings are cheaper and faster than Oracle SPARC Servers, and Dell and RedHat will welcome their money to make the migration.
Sun couldn't make any money and now Oracle in all probability will get what they paid back in addition to future profits and the fact that they conveniently own Java which powers most of their stuff. A lot of feral hippies like bruce perens always like to think that evil corporations are digging their own grave when in actual reality they're laughing all the way to the bank.
I remember a month or two ago a story about rupert murdoch trying to sell myspace and everyone having a good laugh in the comments about how he paid hundreds of millions of dollars for myspace in its prime. True but in addition to all the profit myspace made the 3 year google contract alone got them 900 million $ which is almost 3x what they paid for it. Is it a sign of failure that someones site tanks after they've already paid back the initial purchase and made over half a BILLION $ in profit?
Sun will be the same ... everyone will say how this furthers the end of Oracle and everyone will run away when in reality they'll keep taking a fortune from people who actually have money (ie: not bruce perens.).
At least they can run Linux.
How much of your money did you spent on Mozilla?
How many of your software runs only on Mozila?
(Do you see what I mean, don't you?)
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
They are just milking the old cow before the barbecue.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Ahh, the common excuse given for whenever Mozilla fucks someone over.
Also, your point doesn't really hold - I have invested time and money in plugin development, and many of the plugins I use myself haven't don't work elsewhere.
This is called "unparalleled level of service".
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I`m not excusing Mozilla for nothing.
I'm just explaining because their users don't give a damn about it. Or about your plugins.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
I need some more sleep. X-(
Where I wrote I'm just explaining because, please read I'm just explaining WHY .
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
IBM has it's own JVM implementation, which is fully compliant to the Sun Java specs, so it's safe from patent lawsuits. I don't see how much more they could "love" Java.
By the way, you are not locked down.
It's really that important to you? Checkout the source code and fork the thing.
Does not worth it? Well, this is another problem!!
Freedom to choose does not implies in any guarantees that your choices will be profitable. Or even right.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Planned Obsolescence in hindsight. This may not seem a big deal in the USA, but the rate of growth of internet access in 3B3K nations (3 Billion People Earn $3K Per Year) is 10 times the rate of growth in developed nations. Emerging markets like Cairo and Bombay and Peru, where per capita income is around $3k GDP per capita, keep servers and PCs in use much longer. I hope that Linux is a solution, my dealings with Geeks of Color in emerging markets is that they tend to find creative ways around software bottlenecks. Here's a slide show about how internet growth in emerging markets http://tinyurl.com/6xz9lnk which is leading to things like the Arab Spring revolutions. We need to stop seeing support of legacy tech purely through the eyes of rich nations.
Gently reply
There is no more OpenSolaris; Oracle already kicked that project in the nads back in August. You might use the derived OpenIndiana 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!
Yes. Firefox costs nothing, every platform on which version 4 ran is also supported by 5, Firefox is seldom mission critical software
I think you vastly underestimate the number of companies who use mission critical software via a browser these days, which makes the browser mission critical. Just like a server isn't much use if the app is fine but the OS is broken.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ahh, the common excuse given for whenever Mozilla fucks someone over.
Also, your point doesn't really hold - I have invested time and money in plugin development, and many of the plugins I use myself haven't don't work elsewhere.
Developers are always being screwed over. End users invested very little. I think they've lost the plot at Mozilla. Version 2 was probably the pinnacle. They lost me with Awfulbar.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Oracle has been alienating its customer base (particularly small to mid-level organizations) since they acquired Sun. Our university (mid-size 'business,' fairly large university) is jettisoning Oracle as a hardware/software platform, and I know other organizations that have already done so. Previously we were Sun/Oracle across the board, hardware (including SAN), software, and DB. While our hardware refresh cycle wouldn't be hurt by this decision, I can easily see many organizations which would be hampered to adopt new functionality in perfectly functional hardware. Adieu, Oracle, adieu.
Meanwhile, IBM's newest AIX 7 supports systems all the way back to POWER4 -- systems which were introduced a decade ago. Moreover, IBM just lengthened the standard priced support periods for AIX 6 and AIX 7. And IBM introduced support for AIX 5 running in AIX 7 PowerVM.
I'm using FreeBSD/sparc64 on UltraSPARC IIIi-based SunBlades (single and dual processors), and it's running just fine. I've also installed OpenBSD/sparc64 on some of them, and Debian Squeeze for sparc is running fine too (though I never found out how to netboot that one). It's sad the OpenIndiana hasn't produced a SPARC-release yet out of the frozen IllumOS code-base, but I hope they will eventually be there. As for Oracle as the steward of Solaris, let's forget 'em: they're the abomination they turned out to be the first day they took over.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I once quadrupled the pricing of one of our services. Yes we lost more than half of our customers, but were making more money while doing less work. It's not unlike Apple's strategy.
All this complaining for an OS that isn't even shipping yet. This news tidbit is for a developer's preview drop.
USI - 1995
USII - 1997
USIIe - 1999
USIII - 2001
USIV - 2004
Is anyone really expecting to do an OS upgrade for these post 2011? Really?
Last Apple PowerPC machines shipped in 2006
Snow Leopard shipped in 2009 without PowerPC support.
So Apple didn't release a new OS for machines that were 3 years old. The Sun machine impacted by this are probably 10 years old on average. Yeah, the fact that old hardware was still supported by Solaris 10 was neat but try putting Solaris 10 on some of that old hardware and using something like JDS or ZFS, it's painfully slow.
Solaris 11 hasn't even shipped yet. Add in the fast that most enterprises don't upgrade to a new version of their server OS until it's been out for a while and I doubt this will impact anyone in a production environment.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
And why is the upgrade from firefox 4.0.1 to firefox 5.0 so much harder than the move from 4.0 to 4.0.1?
Both are minor updates, and both bring security updates... If your complaining that 4.x won't have security updates, then surely that means you were actually planning to install such updates as/when they came out... So why not just install 5 instead of 4.0.2?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The idea is that you trust some to make a security ONLY or bug fix ONLY patch that is unlikely to break existing functionality as the changes SHOULD ONLY BE VERY MINOR fixes, not feature or API changes.
Mozilla has said 'we're not supporting any sort of stable target, we will be intentionally breaking things in every single release we make, with no regard for what affect that will have on you, you must patch all of your websites to work with our NEW AND EXCITING bugs after every release we make if you want to have any security patches. We, Mozilla, are the reason you exist and without us, there would be no web, now do what we say!'
And everyones response is to sort of look at them funny, call them barking mad, then just ignore them till they crawl in a whole and die.
I expect 4.0.1 to work exactly like 4.0, except with some bug/security fixes.
I make very limited about 5.x acting anything like 4.x.
Actually, now I don't really expect anything from Mozilla, we just dropped support for it yesterday at our company, which means I don't have to maintain the plugins anymore ... yay! Thanks Mozilla, your ignorant change that would normally have resulted in a fuckton more work actually resulted in less as you no longer matter. You guys are still the best.
Anyone want to take bets on the name of the next incarnation of Netscape after Mozilla goes belly up in a year or two? This has all happened before and it will all happen again.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
People running solaris machines that cost multiple 100s of thousands of dollars which power the applications that ARE their business ... aren't using cracked OSes to do it on.
They will however begin the long task of not using Sun or Oracle products anymore, and while Oracle will rape them for a few years, after that few years is up, Oracle will have fewer customers than they did before they bought out Sun, all paying them less money as they will be working their way away from Oracle to avoid this sort of shafting in the future.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Well MY Mozilla users cared when their plugins broke because with the FF 5 bullshit I got plenty of emails saying "I don't like this, is there something else I can use?" and I sent them straight to Comodo Dragon where plugins don't break on update. See that whole "its free" shit sandwich attitude is kinda a double edged sword since you are free to walk away and I believe you will be seeing quite a few do that. I personally was using Mozilla since the beginning but have now moved myself and my family over to Dragon (except for the oldest who has been and always will be on Opera, but he is just weird) because their bad attitude and plugin breaking were simply the last straw after the CPU and mem hogging of late. After all if it is free I really have nothing invested in staying either, right?
As for TFA reading the comments here I still don't think there are enough companies running 2011 software on 2005 hardware to justify the hoopla. Maybe it is different in Sunland but in the places I dealt with those that were sticking with older hardware stuck with the older OS that came with the hardware as well. Why would you want to slow down your 6 year old machine by trying to run the latest and greatest on it?
Besides Oracle is a DB company and I don't see many DB houses that need the speed of an Oracle DB and are willing to pay the crazy Oracle prices for it running old tech. There has just been too many advances since then (such as another poster pointed out built in hardware encryption and virtualization which isn't supported on these old chips) to be wasting cycles on old gear. in these places it is all about the IOPS from what I've been told and new gear frankly runs rings around even 5 year old chips.
Maybe I'm getting "too old for this shit" but frankly it still blows my mind how quickly we are advancing when it comes to chips. I remember paying frankly crazy money at the turn of this century for a whole 1Ghz CPU and now you have multicore monsters everywhere for peanuts compared to what I was paying just a decade ago. I know the price thing don't count in servers but the equivalent there is the totally insane amounts of data one can process now which would have required 5 times the time and an entire floor just a decade ago. Truly amazing stuff we have now and I just don't see very many Oracle houses caring about this, not when the new gear can crank out the IOPS and Oracle has the current record when it comes to DB throughput.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
All of this is because Oracle wants to be like apple. From a Techcrunch article 04/20/2011 "Larry Ellison has always wanted to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise. " Like Apple, Oracle wants to take away complexity for its customers and bundle the entire IT stack neatly together so that it works without hassles and is optimized for Oracle’s software.
George Carlin had it right.
And if you're a customer, that's when they give you the really big smile! The customer always gets that really big smile as the businessman carefully positions himself directly behind the customer, unzips his pants, and proceeds to "service" the account.
I'm servicing this account...
[pelvic thrust]
This customer
[thrust]
needs
[thrust]
service!
[thrust, thrust, thrust]
Now you know what they mean when they say, "We specialize in customer service." Whoever first said, "Let the buyer beware" was probably bleeding from the asshole.
The unsupported processors all have virtually indexed caches. This isn't in the new processors or x86 and due to the architecture of a new virtual memory subsystem due to land in Solaris 11 it would be a bitch to write a workaround. The old procs are all EOL anyway!
Looks like I won't be loading Solaris 11 on my E10k
Not the same comparison, for the most part.
Sun / Oracle is "big business" where customers pay -large- sums of money for support and maintenance. Apple G5s are likely home machines, though certainly not in all cases. The printing company at which my wife works still uses G5s, but that's because the owner is cheap. He could upgrade, if he wanted, without too much trouble. However, while he can still load the files produced by his customers, he can still get work done on those old boxes, even if they're not running Lion.
On the other hand, at International MegaCorp, where I work, upgrading our Sun boxes would require a shit-load of work and expense, not the least of which would be FDA re-qualification of the medical equipment that we produce that run on specific Sun SPARC hardware.
And, Sun was a server company.
Which means that people who were using their machines for completely different things than databases, are now more or less getting screwed out of newer functionality on older hardware.
Some older Sun machines are still fairly big boxes, and could likely keep with the new OS.
I think it's mostly the clients of Sun who are getting screwed over in this ... but Oracle doesn't seem to care about that.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
All y'all are wasting a lot of clocks debating whether or not this is an act of evil perpetrated by Oracle on loyal Sun customers. I think you're missing the point. Oracle is both pragmatic, and self absorbed. It doesn't give a a fly fsck at a rolling donut about Sun's customers unless they now become Oracle customers, and the sooner it divests itself of what it see's as a cost center (as opposed to a profit center) the happier it thinks its going to be.
If you look at the history and corporate culture of the company, it is not particularly interested in making people warm or fuzzy. It's not fascinated by making close ties to the larger community of tech businesses, open source organizations, or in any meaningful way serving the greater human condition, save its singular focus of making Larry Ellison's deep pocket even deeper.
Is Oracle myopic in burning relationships with potential customers, who should have been a captive audience? You betcha. Is Oracle gutting vital technology, that had promising value for both past and potentially future users of all things Sun? Of this there's no doubt. If a bean counter told Larry he could make an extra million dollars a day by simply pissing on babies, they urinals in the Emerald City would be lined with newborns. He's just that kind of guy. He lives in a world whose vision is a quarter deep, and whose only motive is profit. This is an ignorant, shallow, and mercenary perspective, but that makes him no better or worse than the majority of people running American businesses today. We built the system (or at least let it grow itself) to reward arrogance, blunt force, social stupidity, and a sort of moral vacuum.
We can't honestly complain about anything Larry does, it would be like complaining that a wolverine is a stinking, ill tempered, vicious little bugger, when in fact that's how nature designed it, and you should just make a practice of cutting it a wide berth. The best thing those of us with milder natures, and perspectives based on somewhat broader design, can do, is to happily take away control of that which Oracle will no longer support, and create resources and communities to empower, promote, advance, and evolve these things we love. If Oracle is going to cut us out of its equation, we should simply reciprocate and take the tillers of our collective ships of fate. Sooner or later in his haste and ignorance, Larry will toss the baby out with the bath water. It's a fait accompli.
In the meantime, rather than complaining about the rotten things Oracle does, simply look at solving the problem at hand. It seems that we now have a fairly solid future for Open Solaris. Perhaps its time we all looked at creating an Open Source alternative to Solaris itself, one that supports old and new iron, one that's more interested in creating something really great, than looking for new and exciting ways of squeezing another buck out of its customer base. OR not, your choice. I mean we're free to be stupid too, but then you wouldn't have Larry to blame.
I'm sorry, but there are two forces at work that I think will mitigate the impact you speak of;
1. People in out culture now seem to have the attention span of mosquitoes, and the collective memory of mayflies.
2. The rest of the providers out there seem to be screwing over their customer semi annually, and folks are getting numb to the rape.
Which isn't to say that Oracle isn't growing an army of folks who despise it. They are. They just have a customer base that may be sufficiently tied to the technology Oracle provides that it would take more than an occasional ravishing to turn them away.
A wise man once said businesses have tremendous inertia, it is at least as difficult to kill a business as is it to start one. Oracle has a lot of money in it's war chest. It can afford to do stupid things for the rest of this decade if it had to.
Anybody need a replacement desktop Tatung Ultra 200?
200x2 cpus, hard drive, ram, and an rj45 lan adapter
I'll take $50 US for it, plus shipping.
Was using it as a web server, decided to upgrade to x86 and Debian.
Includes Sun keyboard and Sun mouse, no monitor.
Now im biased as im an oracle dba, but seriously, how can anyone who knows databases think that oracle is not relevant?
RAC - who else has clustered instances that have been tested under fire for several years
DataGuard - who else has disaster recovery solutions that can be up in seconds?
Partitioning - tested for decades, very mature, competition came out with it this decade.
I've not even mentioned performance
the list of features is as long as my arm. No other competitor comes close to the level of maturity and testing that Oracles features have undergone in enterprise environments. And as the old saying goes, no-one ever got fired for choosing Oracle: It's got the market mind-share as the technology leader, and yeah, some of it's going to be bs, but a lot is founded on solid technological facts.
Yes, oracle is a dinosaur, as is it's owner, who you just love to hate, but it doesn't change the fact that the technology is really really good, if somewhat arcane to administer.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
"So i assume Product Management was right with their decision to remove the support in order to make the feature i can't talk of possible, as i don't think that many of the early migrators are still using the system in question, as most systems have reached EOSL."
http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/7363-Result-of-the-How-long-do-you-wait-before-Solaris-11-gets-on-your-prod-systems.html
And as he points out, how many people upgrade their server OS major version? The newest machines cut off are more than two years old, and no one is going for 11 today unless they have to, people will let it sit a while before they switch, if they are going to upgrade stuff, so by the time they do, this will be more than 3 years old.
Plato seems wrong to me today
There is no more OpenSolaris; Oracle already kicked that project in the nads back in August. You might use the derived OpenIndiana distribution instead, but there's a whole different path to uncharted territory.
To be clear, in terms of "using it", it has only been renamed to Solaris 11 Express. You just pkg image-update to it and get an Oracle logo on your desktop.
If you were an outside contributor, then sure, that is no more.
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.
They did not axe Solaris on x86. A Sparc to x86 migration does not necessitate a Solaris to Linux migration. I'm not going to get into relative merits of different makes of x86 servers, they all suck equally far as I'm concerned. However Sun's iLoms suck less with Solaris x86 than a iDrac does with Linux.