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Oracle Shuts Older Servers Out of Solaris 11

Posted by Soulskill on from the hope-you're-done-with-them-'cause-we-sure-are dept.

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."

27 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds like good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:Sounds like good news by zig007 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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

      We ARE talking servers from 2005-2007 here. Servers unlikely and unsuitable for production or any other professional use anyway.
      Also, no end-of-support date for Solaris 10 has even been published yet.

      Oracle is relevant since it still provides some advantages over the competition, no mystery there. However, I know what you mean. :-)

      --
      Baboons are cute.
    2. Re:Sounds like good news by Kjella · · Score: 2

      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

      Because if you need Oracle, you need Oracle. What I do wonder is why so many that don't need Oracle use it, because it's a beast in every way. Even if I went all big and enterprisey I think the costs of running two database systems is lower than trying to be an all-Oracle shop.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re:Sounds like good news by drolli · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Servers from 2005 to 2007 are unsuitable for production?

      The usual life cycle for a server may be slightly longer than 4 years. When i worked in the computing center there were single solaris machines which had specific tasks which were about 10 years old, even the solaris terminal/web servers were in use for 6-8 years.

      For a serious (not in terms of the size) database server i would hope that its possible to operate it for longer (but obvious that does not mean you need a new OS, if the old one is still patched).

    4. Re:Sounds like good news by zig007 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      3, or at the most, 4 years is what at least I am used to, and AFAIK what most servers are specified to run reliably for.
      Of course, one could run servers for longer than that if one wants to take some chances, however there are usually very small gains in doing that.
      "Specific task" servers are typically virtualized, nowadays, so those barely exist.

      Anyway, as I said, older servers can continue to run Solaris 10 if they want.
      And if I were their operators I would not take the risk of doing major updates on them anyway, since 10-year servers often run old software rely on stuff that is likely to have changed in later operating system versions.

      --
      Baboons are cute.
    5. Re:Sounds like good news by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

      Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract. Sure you could run them longer, it isn't like milk where it is just gonna "go bad" but frankly computers are machines just like any other and servers do get more use than your average desktop so I can see businesses not wanting to trust unsupported hardware.

      Now since i'm sure Oracle doesn't sell support for this hardware anymore I bet most companies have already shitcanned them or sold them off, so I bet this will only affect a minority at best. For those that are still running what is frankly in computing terms ancient hardware it isn't like there aren't free Linux distros that will run on these machines, and if you are so concerned about money you are running actual business on a server that old frankly I doubt you're gonna pay for an upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris anyway.

      So I don't see this as any different than say MSFT saying they wouldn't support running Winserver 2K10 on a P4, since that is the age we are talking about here. I just don't see old servers getting expensive new OSes, that just wouldn't make any sense. Maybe someone can chime in here and say why they'd buy new server licenses to run on 6 year old tech?

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    6. Re:Sounds like good news by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3, Insightful

      (but obvious that does not mean you need a new OS, if the old one is still patched).

      I would rather strongly suspect that this will be the bigger factor in customer ire, or lack thereof. Given that SPARC gear has never been cheap, systems of that vintage still in operation were, presumably, purchased because there was some important task to be done that was done best on Solaris and/or SPARC. If that was a matter of performance, an upgrade to some newer hardware is likely in the cards. If it was a matter of specific application compatibility, they are unlikely to be switching OS versions until the present one loses support.

      If 10 is supported for a nice long time, people likely won't care much. If they find that both their existing hardware and their existing software are being ditched, they will be Less. Happy.

    7. Re:Sounds like good news by drolli · · Score: 4, Informative

      The University i studied at bought a (As far as remember, its the only system matching the spec which i remember) Ultra Enterprise 4000 in around 1996 or 1997.

      Please direct your view to:

      http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/lifetime-support-hardware-os-337182.pdf

      So the regular supported time would have been 14 years and the extended supported time would have been longer.

    8. Re:Sounds like good news by ThePhilips · · Score: 2

      We have here some Sun Fire V440s which top list of the problem-free servers. Those are SPARC IV chips and they work and run fine since the

      Oldest Sun server we had IIRC was ~12yo and it was recycle simply because per chance it was noticed that (1) Sun stopped support for the server few years ago (that was me who noticed that) and (2) several business critical apps still ran on the server. (Can't tell you the model number because nobody from IT could recall it.) At least in the past, one has expected 10 years of support for hardware and OS from the commercial UNIX vendors.

      Yeah, lack of new major versions is understandable, but still for my employer would be a major PITA. But luckily we have started move to x64/Solaris 10 (servers made by HP no less!) right now, and the news would only hasten the transition. I doubt Oracle would see any H/W sales from us (and our customers) anymore: as much as I dislike the HP, over past few years their Services proved to be very cooperative: idea of running Solaris on HP x64 hardware (instead of previous HP-UX on Itanic) came from them and they do provide support for both H/W and OS.

      --
      All hope abandon ye who enter here.
    9. Re:Sounds like good news by buchanmilne · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Strange, most place I dealt with the server was gone when the support ran out, which was typically 3 to 5 years depending on the contract.

      So, you didn't have any "big iron" then?

      Now since i'm sure Oracle doesn't sell support for this hardware anymore

      They do.

      I bet most companies have already shitcanned them or sold them off, so I bet this will only affect a minority at best. For those that are still running what is frankly in computing terms ancient hardware it isn't like there aren't free Linux distros that will run on these machines,

      You want to run an unsupported, experimental port of Linux on an E6900, or an E10000, or an E20000?

      and if you are so concerned about money you are running actual business on a server that old frankly I doubt you're gonna pay for an upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris anyway.

      In this market (midrange servers), it's usually not about the money, but the supposed "stability". And, you wouldn't pay to upgrade, you've been paying premium software support to be able to run whatever version of Solaris is supported.

      So I don't see this as any different than say MSFT saying they wouldn't support running Winserver 2K10 on a P4, since that is the age we are talking about here. I just don't see old servers getting expensive new OSes, that just wouldn't make any sense. Maybe someone can chime in here and say why they'd buy new server licenses to run on 6 year old tech?

      Our company bought new UltraSparc III and IV servers (V215s, V445s) in 2008 (bad decision, I didn't support it). At the same time we bought Sun X4450 Intel-based servers. Guess which ones will still have a supported OS in 7 year's time? The cheaper ones with 4 times the cores.

    10. Re:Sounds like good news by buchanmilne · · Score: 3, Informative

      We ARE talking servers from 2005-2007 here.

      The V490, V890, E6900, E20000, E25000 stopped shipping in April 2009. The V445 is Ultrasparc IIIi, was announced in 2007, I think first shipped in 2008, with Solaris 10. So it won't even make *one* OS upgrade?

    11. Re:Sounds like good news by greg1104 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, but if you upgrade your 2005 era server to newer hardware, you have to lube up for what your new Oracle license for the more powerful hardware is going to cost you. And if your server from that era is fast enough for running a small database, why go through all that pain?

    12. Re:Sounds like good news by jgrahn · · Score: 3, Interesting

      We ARE talking servers from 2005-2007 here. Servers unlikely and unsuitable for production or any other professional use anyway.

      We aren't talking just servers, but also workstations. A workstation from 2005 is not old or unsuitable in any way. Universities and workplaces which went Solaris rather than Windows back in the 1990s may have plenty of them.

    13. Re:Sounds like good news by mswhippingboy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      No mystery to large enterprise database users. Oracle absolutely trounces every other DBMS out there for large BW applications in terms of performance and scalability, and naturally it performs best on Solaris.

      Don't bother pointing out the M$ funded benchmarks that claim SQL Server out performs it, I've seen them and I don't buy it (actually, I haven't seen these in a while - could be that M$ has given up on that battle).

      The organizations I work with have large farms of both SQL Server and Oracle DBMS systems. Both have their own teams of DBAs constantly working to optimize these systems, so both are tweaked for max performance. The fact is for the really large DBs Oracle is the only choice as the difference in performance between SQL Server and Oracle is not even close. As an example, I recently worked on a project that migrated a large DB from SQL Server to Oracle (the SQL Server team could not get it to perform well enough to satisfy the requirements). One of the queries (multi-table join on tables with one table containing billions of rows) that ran for 2-3 hours in SQL Server runs in under an hour on Oracle (on roughly equivalent hardware).

      What is a mystery to me is why they run SQL Server at all. Maybe because M$ is cheaper? I don't usually deal with purchasing so I don't know the relative costs, but my experience in a recent engagement I had with a small shop installing SQL Server clued me in on how expensive Sql Server is. It might well be cheaper than Oracle, but it's by no means cheap.

      --
      Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
    14. Re:Sounds like good news by zig007 · · Score: 2

      So, you didn't have any "big iron" then?

      Well, *really* big iron servers are usually partially replaced to achieve longer lifetimes, so it is really a somewhat unfair comparison.
      Anyway, If one runs a Sun Enterprise server, a major operating system upgrade late in the life of the server seems quite pointless as well. It sure doesn't add to stability.

      --
      Baboons are cute.
    15. Re:Sounds like good news by drolli · · Score: 2

      No, absolutely. Please order a server from Dell (i mean, HP sell *serious* Servers) which should serve as the central file server for 10000s of users.

      I think sun failed because they strayed from the path, namely to focus on a client-server architecture which avoids decentralized maintenance tasks.

      When i worked with suns they had 2 or three major bonus points and none was related to price, all related to software features which reduced the TCO. It was easily possible to maintain a *lot* of machines for CIP pools without putting much work in.

      And they were the first to promote thin clients heavily after the rise of the PC. Since Windows dominated the PC market back then totally, these remained niche solutions.

      The other bonus points were the excellent documentation. Even *if* i worked with linux for a long time, when testing opensolaris ten years after working with solaris, i still found it easy to *reliably* figure out how to accomplish a specific task by reading the manual - and *not* hitting in the core of the management functions on undocumented programs (hello, linux networkmanager on Ubuntu).

      Their economic failure was connected to the incapability to use java for getting some serious money in. I.e. they did not manage to establish j2me as a visible standard (it *is* in many phones). In some sense i see the charge of oracle against google as a late attempt to correct this.

    16. Re:Sounds like good news by zig007 · · Score: 2

      What is a mystery to me is why they run SQL Server at all. Maybe because M$ is cheaper?

      1. Yes, it is cheaper, I would say. But not that much anymore. Mostly because Oracle has become cheaper.
      2. Oracle has a steeper learning curve, installation and initial configuration is a bit more difficult.
      3. Less people know Oracle than MSSQL. This is a big thing.
      4. Performance is usually less of an issue, normally, a basically-tuned SQL server will suffice.

      And last, SQL server isn't complete crap anymore. It has actually gotten quite a bit better over the years.
      Strange thing, though, the management tools still suck really hard, and for no apparent reason.
      It is easy to make your own tools(like a process monitor) that is waay better than the ones provided by MS.

      --
      Baboons are cute.
    17. Re:Sounds like good news by zig007 · · Score: 2

      I am not of that conviction.

      Running crappy old servers for development is, in my experience, really shooting oneself in the foot:
      1. The costs of having an entire development department down even ONE day WAY overweights the cost of buying new servers.
      2. Also, old production servers tend to be power-hungry, noisy monsters.
      3. Slow development servers are crap, they:
      3.1 Don't force anyone to optimize, talk about a myth. Optimization is done where it is needed, not everywhere. Slow algorithm and normal common sense is expected, though. However, a sufficiently frustrated developer will eventually not give a damn.
      3.2 Hampers testing by:
      3.2.1. Slowing down continuous builds and automated testing, especially integration tests.
      3.2.2. Frustrating the people that manually tests the product
      3.3. Makes it less funny to display prototypes to customers
      4. Makes it problematic to try new configurations due to lack of application support.
      5. Are often, due to continuous testing and other stuff, under pretty heavy load.
      6. Are mostly virtual anyway.

      There is almost never any actual gain in using older hardware, especially when there are many developers.

      --
      Baboons are cute.
    18. Re:Sounds like good news by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 3, Informative

      PPC is going only in consoles.

      And what is with AS400 and RS/6000 / System p systems from IBM?

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  2. Re:News Flash! by bmo · · Score: 2

    NEWS FLASH!

    BUSINESS SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON REPEAT CUSTOMERS. ENFORCED OBSOLESCENCE WILL MAKE PEOPLE GO ELSEWHERE, LIKE A COMPETITOR. LIKE IBM IN THIS CASE.

    It's not as if Solaris support is free, ya know. They make money even on the old equipment. This is just Larry being a dick.

    One of the reasons for buying Sun equipment in the first place, and paying for the premium over generic white box equipment, was its longevity. If this is no longer the case and the customers are forced on an upgrade path, why stay with Sun/Oracle equipment when there is a supplier that will actually do long-term support? IBM is going to love this.

    --
    BMO

  3. Java by sourcerror · · Score: 2

    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.

  4. Re:News Flash! by wisty · · Score: 2

    NEWS FLASH!

    BUSINESS SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON REPEAT CUSTOMERS. ENFORCED OBSOLESCENCE WILL MAKE PEOPLE GO ELSEWHERE, LIKE A COMPETITOR. LIKE IBM IN THIS CASE.

    It's not as if Solaris support is free, ya know. They make money even on the old equipment. This is just Larry being a dick.

    One of the reasons for buying Sun equipment in the first place, and paying for the premium over generic white box equipment, was its longevity. If this is no longer the case and the customers are forced on an upgrade path, why stay with Sun/Oracle equipment when there is a supplier that will actually do long-term support? IBM is going to love this.

    --
    BMO

    Larry doesn't make money despite being a dick. He makes money by being a dick. He saw Sun's behavior not being dickish enough, and decide to arbitrage it.

    Paraphrasing Steve Jobs, for Sun (now Oracle) to win, IBM doesn't have to lose. In this case, the customer can lose instead!

  5. Re:OpenSolaris, Linux & BSD by greg1104 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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!

  6. Another brick in the wall. by zhrike · · Score: 2

    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.

  7. And Then There's IBM: They Get IT by BBCWatcher · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Alternative OS for SPARC by cpghost · · Score: 2

    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.
  9. Re:News Flash! by BitZtream · · Score: 2

    Larry is losing customers year after year, they just keep charging the ones that are really completely locked into Oracle more and more.

    Oracle has no software advantage over the competition anymore, the only thing they offer that other vendors don't is the name Oracle and a little less effort porting old databases to new versions of Oracle. The lock in of massive systems that are built around Oracle is the only thing that keeps them alive. They offer an inferior product to the competition in every way. Its just a matter of time before they sink, because Larry is being a dick and some other people realized that Oracles only advantage was the amount of time it had been around, so they just started making alternatives. Hell, theres even a free database that can take out any use of Oracle on the small end.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager