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Oracle Staff Report Big Layoffs Across Solaris, SPARC Teams (theregister.co.uk)
Simon Sharwood, reporting for the Register: Soon-to-be-former Oracle staff report that the company made hundreds of layoffs last Friday, as predicted by El Reg, with workers on teams covering the Solaris operating system, SPARC silicon, tape libraries and storage products shown the door. Oracle's media relations agency told The Register: "We decline comment." However, Big Red's staffers are having their say online, in tweets such as the one below. "For real. Oracle RIF'd most of Solaris (and others) today," an employee said. A "RIF" is a "reduction in force", Oracle-speak for making people redundant (IBM's equivalent is an "RA", or "resource action"). Tech industry observer Simon Phipps claims "~all" Solaris staff were laid off. "For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product."
Has there been any word about VirtualBox? That is pretty much the only former-Sun softwarevI use on a regular basis. Since the Oracle purchase of Sun I have wondered why Oracle was keeping it alive.
The big reason they waited so long was they wanted/needed to migrate existing customers onto exa or cloud platforms. If they just killed it quickly they would effectively be loosing those customers, probably forever.
Also OracleDB was one of the only reasons to buy SPARC anymore. Database shops hate platform change in general. No one ever got fired for buying SPARC for the DB environment.
In the early days SPARC was one of the only platforms that you could run x64 Java. Linux x64 was considered unstable and untested at the time.
So we bought massive SPARC boxes to host java apps. A lot of java apps at once. And yes the performance was garbage. A dedicated engineer at least just constantly on the lookout for performance issues.
I still remember one team going OK we built those new linux boxes for you. Only to find out they built them with 32bit linux. They simply would not build them x64. I had to remind them that the whole point of the project was to evaluate java on x64 intel. When they finally did rebuild them properly the initial performance tests were amazing. That company never looked back after that point.
Having spent years struggling with Solaris instability for java (see madness linking required kernel patches to JVM upgrades) I honestly cant think of a single aspect of it that I miss.
Regarding SPARC, I remember the JavaOne conference where Intel engineers sat side-by-side with Sun JVM engineers to describe their partnership to delivery the best Java performance ever. I also remember switching a specific Java application from SPARC to Intel with no other changes and seeing at 23x performance boost while lowering hardware costs. Not missing a single thing about SPARC either.
Perhaps my experience was a fluke. Are there many people out there productive and stable using SPARC and Solaris? I had always assumed the entire market segment was maintaining legacy systems in situations where there was no money to move forward with modern choices.
Solaris and instability in the same post?
YOU SIMPLY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT
Period.
You don't.
Call me when Linux actually implements AUTH_SYS properly instead of randomly grabbing the first 16 groups it finds. Yeah, that asinine, random, now-you-can-access-your-files-now-you-can't works really well in a large enterprise environment with tens of thousands of users.
Call me when Linux fixes pwrite() - read the Linux man page, that bug has been in there for years and prevents access to a file that allows both atomic appends or atomically writes to any location.
Call me when GNU stops trying to get POSIX to remove fork() from the list of functions required to be async-signal-safe - the glibc fork() implementation is broken and not async-signal-safe because the glibc developers STUPIDLY used pthread_atfork() handlers in glibc, of all fucking places. So instead of fixing glibc, GNU is pushing for lower standards.
Not sure if you've noticed, but Oracle have spent the last 2 years pulling volume discounts from under some pretty big companies. My entire multinational has set a deadline to remove all use of Oracle, and I know we're not the only ones migrating from Oracle to Postgres
I didn't, but I'm not surprised. Last time I spoke to someone at Oracle, they said that the revenue from the DB was up, but they had very few new customers. Their real problem is Moore's law and friends. In the early '90s, payroll for a moderately large company took a serious database on high-end hardware to manage, with several hours of compute time to complete the payroll calculations each week. Now, that same company is maybe 10 times the size, but you can buy a computer more than 100 times better in terms of RAM, storage capacity, storage speed, and processor speed, for a few hundred dollars. On a modern machine, you don't need carefully optimised queries and carefully designed on-disk data structures - you can probably fit the whole thing in RAM and run the computations in Lua and still get the whole thing done in a second or two. At one end of the market, most customers can now run their systems with cheap commodity hardware and software. At the other end of the market, companies like Facebook and Google have more data than Oracle can easily handle and couldn't afford Oracle license fees even if there was a viable Oracle product for them to buy. The middle is gradually shrinking.
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