[pca] Solaris 10 Patches Now On Monthly Release Cadence

[Dennis Clarke]

On 10/16/13, Glen Gunselman  <ggunselm at emporia.edu> wrote:
> I'm starting to think we may have completely missed the point. I think perhaps the situation is just the opposite - Oracle Solaris is overly dependent on the customer.
> 

I feel that most customer sites out there are not adopting Solaris 10 or 
Solaris 11 as a new solution. I have only seen Solaris servers running
because the CTO has not yet figured out a way to get rid of them. Every
other case is just maintenance and monitoring while someone in the 
IT department finds a way to migrate over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux
or SUSE Linux. Certainly I can say that I had my hands in the migration
of a large collection of servers away from Solaris a few years ago, but
those were dark days for the brandname. Everyone was afraid of where
the OS and the technology was heading. What I did find interesting was 
that the same people that would say "we need to get rid of this before we
are stuck with a dead platform from Oracle" would then follow me to the
next meeting where we were installing piles of Oracle DB, WebLogic and 
WebSphere ( this is one of the big three auto makers ). All of that was 
fine and good because it was all going onto new vSphere virtual machines
running SUSE Linux. Something you just can't do with Solaris on SPARC
and don't even bother bringing up Solaris on x86_64 or you get laughed
out of the room. Sad but true. 

I will say that I have seen some substantial commitment within the financial
sector on the newer Oracle SPARC T4 and T5 line. It wasn't easy but some
people saw the level of long term stability in the name "SPARC" as well as
the fact that Oracle had published a timeline for Solaris support well into
the year 2021 for Solaris 10 and then into 2024 for Solaris 11. That is a 
real step in the right direction because no one wants to move platforms once
they get their new business process and forensic audit software in place on
a shiney new set of T4's. 

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/solaris/overview/releases-jsp-140987.html

 Regardless, these sort of small wins are few and far between. I would 
argue to the mat with anyone to find a better OS upon which you can run 
the really critical software a company needs but we all know that popular 
opinion is 90% of the battle. Those who speak out against the church get 
burned alive at the stake all while screaming "but the world is round!" however
no one is listening. They are all saying prayers over at the Linux cathedral. 

One final thought is that we really need better support for developers. It is a
tough argument to convince people to use Solaris 10 on SPARC and then have
to face the fact that Oracle Studio 12.3 requires another pile of money just
to get patch updates. Even worse, the Oracle salesreps are clueless about
how to get that added to a support contract. You can eventually find a link
somewhere wherein you have to throw money on a credit card but that is 
the wrong approach. Businesses just want a quote to which they issue a 
PO number and hand it over to accounting. Good luck trying to get support
for Oracle Studio and if you don't have top notch developer support then 
you get no where with implementing a software solution which in turn kills
the platform. Very frustrating.

( You made a reference to HHGTTG and that convinced me to chime in. )

Dennis
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