Hello.
I'd been working as Sun Campus Ambassador for about two years before Sun
eclipse. Sun technologies seemed astonishing. Also we had several SPARC
servers in university computer center.
However, price for SPARC hardware was unreasonable. Our new platform is
x64 IBM blades. What about Solaris? We had big Solaris deployments in
90-th. Later we moved to FreeBSD. We still had two SRSS servers till
this year. This year we merged them (dismissed one of the servers). We
longer have no SPARCs. (Last SRSS server is amd64-based). I wished for
long time to replace SXCE with CentOS on the last server, but its usage
doesn't justify this work. It is almost unnecessary now. It was used to
provide Internet access for students, but SunRay terminals are ugly
thing: they don't support standard protocols, so they were partly
replaced by other terminals.
About two years ago when we discussed our next platform (there are
problems with multipath in FreeBSD on our hardware) Solaris 10 was a
choice for critical servers. We could get security updates and some
batch updates. And we could use it for free. Now it's not a choice.
My chief doesn't want to hear about OpenIndiana - he says that there is
no stable release, it is not supported by any major IT company and we
can't predict what will happen with this OS in two years.
It seemed that everything could change for Solaris when it became
open-sourced. But now it is just a highly specialized storage-oriented
platform. I think our new students may never hear about it. So be it.
It's just a direct consequence of Oracle policy.
I'm really happy that successful Solaris technologies live on in Illumos
and FreeBSD. But commercial Solaris now is like AIX - one more walking
corpse. By closing source of Solaris 11 and stopping aggressive
advertisement company in universities Oracle killed future for this OS.
But it seems they didn't put their money in Solaris - they bought Java
and MySQL, another technologies were not very interesting for them.
It's just my story about future of Solaris in our university.
Just my two cents.
On 08/02/2011 01:43, Gary Driggs wrote:
On Aug 1, 2011, at 12:26 PM, Apostolos Syropoulos wrote:
And now that Oracle has close sourced Solaris, I am very sure you will count
its users with the fingers of your hands!
Single desktop users? Sun Ray users? Server users? Enterprises, small to medium business,
or sole proprietorships? Public or private sector? Universities and non-profit orgs? When
you say "user," it's inconclusive without qualifying the demographic you're
referring to.
--
Best regards,
Alexander Pyhalov,
system administrator of Computer Center of Southern Federal University
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