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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."

14 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 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).

    3. 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.
    4. 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.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.

    7. 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?

    8. 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?

    9. 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.

    10. 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.
    11. 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: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!

  3. 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.