I keep in touch with friends still at Oracle. Strong rumors of cuts in Hardware Sales and support on Monday. Rumor was heard from the top as high level management is looking themselves.
Side note, severance package is good and it floated me until I found a new job, which pays more. Took about 60 days to go through the interview process. So start now.
Interviewers laughed whenever I mentioned Oracle cloud. The market knows its all hype with little investment.
Get out and move on, you'll be better off trust me
Bottom line. Current ZFS management do not have balls.
I feel for those that are losing their jobs, but how can you not enjoy the irony here. FS1, the biggest turd and money loser in the hardware portfolio, is gonna outlast them all.
At this point, who doesn't think LE is senile?
Compared to the rest of Oracle, hardware related sales are a drop in the bucket. Total hardware sales each year are $4B and dropping. Compared to cloud and software which bring in $30B annually and is climbing. Here is what you have to consider..
Sonoma was cancelled because Fujitsu beat Oracle with the M12 servers on price and performance. So a big defeat for SPARC hardware at Oracle.
WC stole funding from JF to work on Linux 2.0 for OPC. He lost that bet because OPC doesn't need Linux 2.0. Now WC owns Solaris and will gut it because he doesn't like Solaris. Everything else under WC doesn't make money for Oracle.. Linux, OVM, etc. Now he has a cash cow, Solaris. He has never run anything into the profitable black, so don't expect things to last long for Solaris.. he will screw that up too! WC will tell management crazy plans that go nowhere, while he guts the teams slowly to kill Solaris.
FS1 was a dud and wasn't selling, so it was delisted. Now they are hoping to help the Bare Metal team, but they may not need FS1. Remember Bare Metal team hires from AWS, Google, Azure, etc to solve problems, not in-house. Think the FS1 team will succeed? Really? FS1 team will try their best to destroy ZFS. Expect cuts in ZFS people to be the way of achieving that. The Bare Metal team will fix their block storage problems and tell the FS1 team to screw off just like they did to WC's Linux 2.0 joke.
WC is already working on making Oracle Linux run on ARM. There are teams looking at FPGAs for AI and ML.. so does SPARC really matter??
Customers are pissed at what happened to Solaris 12. Hardware sales are drying up because of this. No one is buying the Solaris 11 forever story, it's being mothballed. Key Solaris engineers are leaving or retiring in the face of all of this crap. Solaris 11 is the end of the line and will run out support wise by 2037. They could out-source that. Why not sell it to Fujitsu?
FC is leaving because the plan is to mothball the hardware and OS businesses. Rest of SPARC, Solaris, and ZFS teams have poor management with no balls or backbone. So don't expect a comeback, they are rolling over like good little corporate citizens.
SPARC Cloud is a joke. The team running that is clueless and are letting OPC undermine them. They needed Solaris OpenStack but now have to rely on Linux OpenStack to try and make it work. Customers are walking away from this disaster before it even takes off.
Hardware SC's and SE's have been laid off already. All of the senior ones were RIF'ed last time around. Who's going to sell the hardware? Oracle Direct? ECAs? Really?? WAKE UP!!
Network switch team.. GONE
Infiniband team.. GONE
Sonoma team.. GONE
Think we'll have M8? Maybe M9? Keep your fingers crossed kids.. M7/T7 may be it! Oracle should sell it to Fujitsu with Solaris to keep this stuff going. At least Fujitsu is serious about this technology!
Bottom line..
GAME OVER!!
Do you really think FS1 will even work let alone be able to do what they say it will do, the POS has never worked right and their years late getting it out.
ZFS is the one bright spot in systems and is still doing well in the field. Hit over a billion in revenue a few years back and have their fair share of cool customers. The Weta ZFS video on youtube is really neat.
However, the product has two problems:
1) It is, or at least was, under JF. Bad things happen to products under JF.
2) Its revenue is 100% from on-premise... you need to be 100% cloud these days
ZFS is the storage backbone of the Oracle Cloud now, but going forward it will be FS1. There was an article in theregister about this last week. ZFS will probably go into sustaining mode pretty soon, the same model as Solaris. Customers are obviously going to be furious at this decision.
Why cut profitable ZFS or it is fake revenue?
What percent of Solaris, SPARC, and ZFS engineers will be RIFed? What locations will be hit?
"Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS5-4 combines seamless integration with the Oracle Public Cloud, unique Oracle Database capabilities, and enterprise-grade NAS to accelerate business-critical workloads and reduce risk, from on premises to the cloud.
ZFS Storage ZS5-4 | Oracle
A la Oracle Marketing Dept Copywriters
LOL
Major cuts to Systems are coming next week. Solaris, SPARC, and ZFS are expected to be hit hard. Whenever engineers are cut, sales follows swiftly after.