All hands meetings being cancelled on orders from legal to prevent news from spreading.
Hardware teams being told to cease development.
There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4.
Orders coming straight from Larry.
No info on timing yet.
Sorry, meant to ask @ernj for source
@esfu, source?
Do you guys know where to buy JOMA indoor in Krakow?
Not just China. It's all over the globe. Basically Solaris is deemed unpopular and not selling.
Entire china solaris team just got announced, everyone is rif
The 1st phase of Oracle Sun-side layoffs started in mid-August
following and prompted by the courts decision in May that found that
Google had not infringed on Oracle-owned copyrights because Google's
re-implementation of Java APIs is protected by fair use (Oracle since
announced its intention to appeal and officially did so on October 26, 2016)
Safra Catz had testified that Oracle bought Sun because so much of Oracle's
own product was based on Sun's Java, and they were concerned about
what would happen if IBM had acquired Sun who Oracle knew had approached Sun.
But Oracle also got Sun's hardware business, most of which it flicked off
as it continued to allow incompetent Sun management (John Fowler Mike Splain
and others in the Systems/processor Groups e.g. Ramamurthy etc.) to
rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic
(their business acumen: from 2001 onward Sun had been hemhorraging revenue
at a clip of ~ -$1B per year)
The part of the hardware that Oracle kept is used to create its
"Exadata" business designed to run its software, particularly the Oracle database.
Oracle originally sued Google for $6 billion – an amount that would have
pretty much paid for the Sun acquisition (purchase price ~$7.4B - ~ $2B Sun had in cash)
but the judge at that time rejected the amount as being way too high.
Court rulings have not been favorable to Oracle and the forecast for the
outcome of the current appeal is not promising so its time to initiate
phase 2 of layoffs and eliminate the unnecessary and inneficient Sun hardware
particularly since that's not in the in Cloud future linux x86 business
Say goodbye to Solaris SPARC Fowler Splain et al..
When: after Q2 and holidays
@elcs
Great answer!
Don't BS IBM please
Search the web with IBM LinuxONE and read the text .
Forget articles that are 4 years old ....
Imho , The battle " my processor is faster than yours " is a story of last century
In option , open another tab in your browser and search "i am a customer and i want to move my Oracle db to Progresql "
Don't BS IBM please
It seems that IBM supporters are FUDing again against the competition. Knowing that the new coming POWER9 is slower than the current SPARC M7, the IBM crowd has tried to combat the competition with false rumors instead. Fact is, IBM executives have said that AIX is going to be canned, and replaced by Linux:
https://www.cnet.com/news/ibm-linux-is-the-logical-successor/
"...The day is approaching when Linux will likely replace IBM's version of Unix, the company's top software executive said... While IBM doesn't expect Linux to replace its own AIX version of Unix any time soon, Big Blue is pushing the open-source OS in the that direction, Steve Mills, senior vice president of IBM's Software Group, told CNET News.com.... Asked whether IBM's eventual goal is to replace AIX with Linux, Mills responded, "It's fairly obvious we're fine with that idea...It's the logical successor....The road map is clear. It's an eight-lane highway."
@KBEVoB1-acxt well, the people developing the ZFS Storage Appliance care and so by proxy the people buying it because let's face it the ZFS Storage Appliance is called so for a reason: ZFS. And that's what the people care for. And in enterprise quality ZFS is pretty much bound to Solaris. As the ZFS Storage Appliance is x86 , any idea of reducing Solaris to SPARC is somewhat problematic as well. It seems many products are intervowen at Oracle.
@KBEVoB1-abej: have to agree with @KBEVoB1-afqj, don't see much running on x86 commodity stuff. zfs appliance is appliance, frankly the selling point is storage, not OS. nobody cares what OS it's running underneath.
Chinese need their own chip and OS so it is nature fit
FT-2000(?) is opensparc based used in their HPC server front end already , the new sunway 246 core chip is alpha based and run Linux.
If Chinese control Solaris and SPARC then they can control chip and so
Sale SPARC and Solaris to Chinese.
@KBEVoB1-afqj: All the people using the ZFS Storage Appliance? Okay it's not commodity hardware, but it's x86.
@KBEVoB1-9gbi or @KBEVoB1-9asa: how many people do you know run Solaris on X86 commodity hardware? I'm curious cause I have not heard anyone doing that since the last 7-8 years. what I see all the time is companies (like mine) moving away from Solaris X86 onto Linux instead.
I think it makes sense to make Solaris as SPARC high perf OS, but then not many people use that either.
-9dgo
You should read all the posts besides this one then see what you think.
Like I said earlier and will say it again to all idiots on this posts.
This rumor is BS. It relies on a very weak foundation and a couple of poor assumptions.
I'd like to suggest to improve your investigative approach and get access to much better sources.
@KBEVoB1-7qrj SIlly bugger, are you talking Solaris or SPARC?
Solaris runs comfortably in both SPARC and x86 doing with easy many things that Linux can only dream about (nothing wrong with Linux, I love it, but it is no match technically speaking).
@KBEVoB1-8ybs , you may be horrified to know that Solaris runs in x86 fine, even in commodity hardware.
@KBEVoB1-3vjz is your all hand finished or is sitll going (6 days later)?
I say yawn....
@9ujp There is of course no package if you transfer. Even if you take the package and are then re-hired shortly afterwards, you have to give it back.
What is the source of this? If this a a hoax it's extremely irresponsible .. signed a former SUNW employee.
Hey 9yoy as a customer with lots of oracle gear in your shop, call Thomas Kurian and ask him what's going on, then you'll know. Kurian will tell you the truth. Then come back here and tell us
You missed some of the postings earlier. Some postings earlier said (and of course this is purely based on honesty/honor system) they either know these folks, or are very close to source, or in this predicament. To me those are good enough source.
You know Oracle will never publicize this, so forget about finding IT news for it. You'll find out later when your support contracts are modified. That said, I think this is mostly software/Solaris. Reading all this, SPARC seems to stick around.
@KBEVoB1-9yoy : Well ... we got a people elected into very high places based on a lot of b---s--- recently. Since then i can imagine a lot. As someone has written before, there is still no verifiable source, there is no way to tell how many people are behind the Post IDs (it could be everything between one behind almost all or it could be a normal usage pattern) none of the large IT news portals has reported about this and perhaps a employee that left Oracle years ago is not the best indicator for whats happening inside Oracle today and really strange reason have been posted, why people haven't heard of it. Furthermore the timing is strange: In the middle of their Quiet Period. I understand why people call it b---s---. Otherwise i'm really curious about what the truth: There is a lot of Oracle gear in my server room.
In case transfer to another team during RIF, he/she can still get the package?
@KBEVoB1-9rzw - Very funny. Why do you think it's BS and yet hundreds of people commented. Have you looked at ex Sun Solaris kernel engineer comment (who now works for Netflix) at the y-combinator? Maybe that will give you insights.
This rumor is BS. It relies on a very weak foundation and a couple of poor assumptions.
I'd like to suggest to improve your investigative approach and get access to much better sources.
Solaris has been dying. This is not a surprise. It's growing away from the popular demand, and it's getting more complex/difficult to use, even when it was still Sun. Post Oracle acquisition I've seen a bit of a pick-up in release delivery, and attempts to make it more mainstream by porting in several popular open source software, but all is said and done - customers have been moving away.
I know the topic is true because of a friend who's intimate with the details. This not only affects Solaris but other areas of Oracle that are not selling well, some hardware related. But yes, Solaris is affected quite a bit because it's one of the larger teams whose product is continuing to lose momentum, and whose sole purpose is to run SPARC.
What's that mean?
I hear from China team they say entire solaris gone there now , just announce. maybe feb.
The writing is on the wall, regardless of the validity of this message.
Look at messages on this site, the fact is that legacy enterprise tech is being hammered since Dec 2015...
If you look at recent messages you'll see Intel, Qualcomm, Honeywell, IBM, Seagate, Western Digital, NetApp, etc. All of them are getting hammered as more things are moving to Cloud and there is less demand for their wares.
Back to Solaris, it's a great product but I doubt it'll be a major player for Oracle regardless of what they decide to do with it. Knowing Hurd, he'll want to cut, that's his game and with Solaris having difficulties contributing, they may as well get cut.
Take all of this with a grain of salt, I've been proven wrong before, yet, this is how I see things.
@KBEVoB1-7zeq They are in quiet period. They can't say anything substantial. They wouldn't even tell you the time of the day if this would be substantial to investing decisions. A former Oracle employee working here now, told me they are really strict about that.
I would even like it, if they "cancel" Solaris 12 and call it Solaris 11.4 under the condition that they call Solaris 13 whatever the current version number is tat that point (in the sense, they don't stop after the next version). Would save me a lot time of discussions with Oracle and my software vendor about "Is Solaris 12 supported?". At the end the version number doesn't matter. I want the features.
From the beginning of this thread i thought if this fuzz about the cancelation of Solaris 12 could be in reality only rooted in a "how do we call the baby" question.
Welcome to the longest running thread ever - we do feel about our Solaris, don't we...
To the Oracle-Roadmap-Referencers, a huge credibility boost would come from Oracle releasing a roadmap for SPARC and/or Solaris updated after Dec 1st. Oracle doesn't debunk rumours so this won't happen because of this thread here, and all you achieve by pointing at an old roadmap is to lend credibility to those claiming it's torn up - that claim is the sole reason this thread here exists.
Yet, Oracle will be doing forward-looking statements on Dec/16th (earnings release) and quite probably, since all their big brass is on stage, during their cloud world events starting from Jan 2017.
Given Oracle's (non-)information policy, ending it would actually help - by also killing the need to always argue-the-extra-mile for Solaris with the corp bean counters who doubt the justification for prototype build spending for Solaris-based solution using the argument "it may not be around / avail anymore in a year". A horrible end is preferable to endless horror...
1) Layoffs have happened in the past and will happen again in the future as all business cycles.
2) Solaris 11.4 has been canceled (so this supposed internal whistleblower is telling a lot false intended rumors)
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf
3) Solaris 12 is still on the roadmap (here again: internal whistleblower is telling a lot false intended rumors)
4) Solaris 12 Beta has been released for few customer who are enjoing it.. since weeeeks
Solaris still Rocks!
X
The market demand is simply not there to warrant the dev costs of sparc. It's very simple.
The Sun hardware Systems executive management that drove that Company into the ground
was allowed to remain in place and tolerated far too long despite
clear indication following the acquisition that things were not turning around
with the more recent extensions of the SPARC architecture
The purge that is taking place now should have occured 5 years ago.
Stockholders should insist that this is completed well before end of FY17
JF is incompetent and people like Ramma-Lamma-Ding-Dong think this is nothing more
than f'in a-hole time in Dixie for H-1's
Lot of FUD here.
1) Top500 supercomputers are huge clusters. Linux scales well on clusters. HPC clustered workloads run number crunching for loops on a same set of grid points, over and over again. Everything can be run in parallel in the cpu cache. No synching among cpus. Everything run independently on separate cpus. One cluster such as SGI UV3000, serves one scientist at a time, doing 24h calculations. These are scale-out servers. Linux scales excellent on scale-out servers.
Business workloads such as SAP, OLTP databases, etc communicate lots among cpus and synchronize a lot when serving thousands of users. All these thousands of users do different things simultaneously (pay roll, accounting, etc), so you can not cache the workload in a cpu cache. You need to go out to RAM all the time. Typically, RAM is maybe 100 ns or so. This corresponds to a 10 MHz cpu. You remember those? When you do business workloads (serving thousands of users) you scale up to 16 or 32-sockets tops. No more. Clusters are totally useless because when you synchronize among node to node on a network, performance drops much much much much more. You need to have all the cpus on the same bus, i.e. one single huge scale-up server.
SGI explains this well:
http://www.realworldtech.com/sgi-interview/6/
The largest scale-up server on the market is a 64-socket Fujitsu SPARC M10-4s, it has 64TB RAM and runs Solaris. The largest Linux scale-up server is the new HP Kraken which has 16 sockets. It is a redesigned Unix Integrity server which scaled up to 64-sockets when sporting Unix/RISC. Other than the HP Kraken, all the rest of the x86 servers are plain vanilla 1-8 sockets. And Linux scales awful on 8 sockets. Why? Because Linux kernel devs dont have access to 8 socket x86 servers. So how can Linux scale on 8-socket servers when no developer can optimize Linux for 8-sockets? Linux kernel devs have 1-2 sockets tops. And on 1-2 sockets Linux scales well. There is no way Oracle can sell large business servers or database servers, if Oracle switches to Linux. Only Unix and Mainframes have large scale-up servers, serving thousands of users.
2) It seems that Linux on Exadata scales to 2-sockets T7 SPARC cpus. This only proves my point. You will never see Linux on large 16 sockets M7 servers, because Linux maxes out on 2-socket SPARC T7 cpus.
3) Oracle has invested tremendously in SPARC. In five years, Oracle has released six SPARC cpus. Each generation has always been twice as fast as the previous (except S7 which is a crippled M7). Intel generations are 10% faster than the previous generation. The worlds fastest cpu is SPARC M7, with 30ish world records:
https://blogs.oracle.com/BestPerf/entry/20161201_java_streams_and_dax
Even the new coming POWER9 will not be able to beat the M7. T7 is the same cpu as the M7. I doubt Oracle will kill SPARC, as it is 2-3x faster than POWER8 and Intel X86. And we all know that Linux can not drive a 16-socket SPARC, you need Solaris for that. If Oracle kills Solaris, then Oracle is stuck at 1-2 socket SPARC M7 cpus. Nothing larger. And the big money is in large business servers. And Oracle does big money, not tiny money.
4) Fujitsu use SPARC for their large M10-4S business servers. These compete with Mainframes. The new Fujitsu supercomputer will use ARM cpus. Each ARM is very weak, but that is not important because what is important in supercomputers is low watt usage. 1MWh costs 1 million USD year. Also, supercomputers do not run vanilla Linux. They strip out everything of Linux until a minimal skeleton kernel remains. If you can optimize 5% then the entire supercomputer runs 5% faster. IBM Blue Gene which ran Linux, actually used Linux only for I/O to distribute the workload to the nodes, and then each node ran a special light weight OS that can only do number curnching and nothing else.
5) Unix is dwindling. Linux is eating the Unix cake. This is true. However, Oracle engineered systems running Unix or Linux are growing very rapidly. This is also true. Linux can only take you to a few sockets. The largest engineered systems has to be Solaris/SPARC. Oracle has the entire stack: cpus, OS, middleware, database, ERP software. This means Oracle can make huge optimizations, for instance, DAX database accelerators in the cpu, can be utilized by the OS and by the middleware and the database. This means a SPARC M7 is typically 10x faster than x86 on database workloads, because of DAX, OS and middleware. If you own the entire stack, you can do this.
Oracle needs Solaris for the largest workloads. With Linux Oracle is stuck with a couple of sockets. Look at the SAP benchmarks. It's Unix/RISC at the top with the largest workloads. Linux/x86 at the bottom with small workloads.