Yesterday I received the news that Oracle plans to port their own Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux, to SPARC. A pretty cool idea. 🙂 But after talking with a very good friend I’m not sure if this news is a good news.
Why pay lot’s of money for porting a operating system to a new platform? Oracle owns Solaris and everbody knows that’s a proven and stable operating system for SPARC. Lot’s of application and tools are available for Solaris, too. With the upcoming Solaris 11 release you even get more new features that other operating systems cannot offer.
Or think about mission critical systems. With Solaris and Sun Cluster you have rock solid high available system. Many companies running such configurations several years with success.
From an economic perspective it’s not a good decision, too. Oracle have to invest lot’s of money for the SPARC port and then Oracle have to maintain two similar operating systems for the same target. In another words, Oracle pays for developing four operating systems!!! Solaris SPARC and Solaris x86, OEL SPARC and OEL x86.
That’s not the typical Oracle business! Of course, Oracle supports different platforms but do not offer two identical software products.
Is this perhaps the dead of Solaris? Maybe Oracle plans to port everything to Linux and to stop developing on Solaris? What do you think? Feel free to comment!
Hmm, didn’t Oracle buy Sun for the Software? Perhaps they want to attract the die hard Linux users to the SPARC Platform. Personally I think that could be the only explanation.
Hmm, but why should „die hard Linux users“ buy a SPARC-Server? Don’t get me wrong, I love my SPARC-Boxes, but you have to spent a little more of your € or $ for the nice boxes than for Dell-Server. And by the way, Linux for SPARC isn’t a new Port. Redhat delivers Redhat for SPARC til 6.2.