The SPARC architecture is still alive and well (q.v. the T4 released last year). Oracle has made it well known that they intend to continue to release and support SPARC architecture and when I took a tour of their high end server manufacturing facility in Hillsboro, Oregon around this time last year, it was quite evident that x86 was largely present only in the Exadata platform and its spinoffs (this is actually where all Exadata systems are assembled for worldwide shipment). So SPARC may be considered a dead end by the Illumos project and its subsidiaries but I would be very surprised to see SPARC deprecated any time soon. That said, if you're buying SPARC hardware in the first place (I know of a regional telco that has several dozen M5s) then you're also paying for Solaris support in the process so I imagine that most orgs buying on this scale aren't interested in running an OS that comes without an enterprise support option -- front line admins are usually OK with doing so but management often insists on having someone external to blame should disaster occur without timely remediation.
q.v. http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc-enterprise/Overview SPARC is dead. Long live SPARC. ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
