Solaris: Should You Stay Loyal?

The future of Solaris is in question. Oracle certainly wants to keep is alive, as many of its database customers run on Solaris, but what about everything else Solaris is used for? The important question is one of strategy: you need to quickly decide if your Solaris usage should be reserved only for the essentials, if it should be eliminated, or if it should grow.

I admit it: I was a huge fan of Solaris as recently as two years ago. Solaris is really a great operating system, and when developers at Sun were given free rein they created some amazing components, notably ZFS and DTrace. Great or not, recent events should be worrying. Will Solaris continue to evolve and provide new and useful tools? Or will it stagnate and become a niche OS like the other two corporate Unix versions (HP-UX and AIX)?

Solaris’s Place

Simply put, its place is: big servers running Oracle software. This nicely results in one-stop shopping for Oracle customers. Get your hardware, OS support, and database software from one place, and have only a single place to call when support is needed. It’s a nice idea, if you can afford it.

Here are a few reasons to seriously reconsider your relationship with Oracle-Sun products:

• No more free security patches.
• 150% fines when a support contract lapses.
• No more hardware-only support.

Read the rest at Enterprise Networking Planet.