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Oracle To Stop Developing Sun Virtualization Technologies
hypnosec writes "Oracle will soon be announcing its decision to stop development of Sun virtualization technologies including Sun Ray Software and Hardware, Oracle Virtual Desktop Client, and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) product lines. In an update to its support policies [Oracle support login required] for virtualization software and hardware, the database company has revealed that this decision is a result of its efforts to 'tightly align Oracle's future desktop virtualization portfolio investments with Oracle Corporation's overall core business strategy.'"
Oracle had a business strategy beyond "turn everything we touch into shit"?
This coming on the heals of XenServer going open source.
As soon as they realize the futile effort of supporting Sun hardware (Niagara, Sparc) and Solaris which are not selling well, they will also cease supporting them as well.
Frankly, I think IBM would have been a better company to have owned Sun and its assets.
As I had to RTFA to figure this out, thought I'd pass on that VirtualBox is still going to be actively developed.
Has anyone ever thought that the Oracle might be evil?
since [Ellison] was hired
He kind of founded the company.
I doubt they would be killing them off if they were profitable. I do a lot of work in the virtualization and VDI space (not all of it by choice, mind you) and I have never run into anyone even asking about Oracle in those regards. AFAIK the only thing that could be considered really successful is Virtual Box and it's sticking around, thank [omnipotent bearded deity #4].
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
For reference, what your post tells others is that you started this Internet thing late and missed the era where Sun was one of the big boys in the server and workstation arenas.
Just because you were only around for their decline doesn't mean thats the way it always ways :)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I have to agree. While everyone kind of liked SUN and cherished their accomplishments - few ever bought anything of them.
It might have worked, if everybody actually using Solaris had also bought SUN x86 servers instead of installing it on generic hardware and bought more software from their stack. Additionally, for too long their business strategy seemed to be "Let's invent some mind-blowingly cool stuff and then have sales try to sell it to our customers".
And this not for one product, but basically for almost all of the products they came up with in the last years.
Oracle has no choice but to milk their current customers literally till the sun goes down.
No kidding. Sun's x86 hardware kicked ass. Unlike Dell and even HP, Sun actually engineered their x86 servers. They didn't just slap cheap-ass commodity components around the CPU.
A recent customer went through a lot of trouble replace "old" Sun x86 hardware that had been around four or five years with new HP hardware - to "save money", because HP's servers were cheaper than Oracle's servers (that Sun designed...).
Note I said "cheaper", not "less expensive". Yeah, the HP's were cheaper than the Sun servers. And slower. The four or five-year-old Sun x86 boxes were a shitload FASTER than the brand-spanking-new HP servers. Talk about a bunch of howling developers. I was laughing my ass off.
And even with the Oracle markup, after my customer had to go out and buy licences for software to manage HP servers - OOOOOPS! (iLO software, etc), the HP boxes turned out to be more expensive than the equivalent Oracle (nee Sun) servers. At least Oracle doesn't charge extra for things like that.
HP's servers also came with cheap off-brand FC HBAs that wouldn't play nice on the customer's SAN. Good God, crappy FC hardware that can't interoperate with other vendor's equipment was solved by QLogic et al a fucking decade ago.
Yes, I'm impressed.