Originally posted by: LuckyTaxi
Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Solaris will be around for a long time. Oracle has already said they love it and will be continuing it. It's not a bad system (just CLUNKY). I keep thinking I'd love to have a Solaris box, but I'm poor/lazy. 😛
We are an oracle consultant shop, hence my desire to learn Solaris in case we need to support someone who runs it in their environment.
I too am poor, which is why I'm installing it on x86 system, but I know the solaris fan boys will hate me for doing it. Oh well ...
You guys do know that you can get a Sun system pretty cheap right? Check out ebay for Ultra60's... Personally I picked up one that was listed "for parts" because they could not get it to turn on for $20 + shipping. The case switch was broken. But anyone who knows anything about Sun gear would have tried the alternate power switch located on the keyboard (which was the second thing I tried) and the system booted right up. I loaded up solaris 10 and was good to go.
While I lucked out, there are other cheap deals there. That said, DON'T get a Sunblade 100 or 150. They are horrible POS boxes that were really just intended for giving people terminal at their desk. This is why you will see them real cheap on ebay compared to a dual processor Ultra60, even though the Ultra60 is at least 4 years older than the Sunblade.
Once you pop in 2GB of RAM in an Ultra60 it is a very usable machine, even now. RAM can be found pretty cheap on ebay, you just have to realize that you can use up to 128MB dimms, and that RAM from Ultra1, Ultra2, Ultra30, Ultra60, Ultra80, E250, 280R, and E450 all work (as long as it is under 128MB in size, only the Ultra80 and 280R could use the 256 and 512MB dismms in that class).
And if you are an Oracle shop, you would know that the primary OS combination with Oracle is actually Solaris, so it is not something that is going to go away now that Oracle purchased Sun. The current belief is that Oracle is simply going to optimize the OS even more to better run Oracle. That and develop an Oracle "appliance", (i.e. a black box that you can purchase fully pre-configured and simply drop in place on your network that is to be used as your Oracle server, much like Sun's current Unified Storage Systems...and in fact will probably be based on that existing hardware since they support a clustered, high available server platform with a decent storage backend, oracle just needs to be installed on the system which is already running Solaris 10, and configured to use the disks available already, and with these systems use dual T2 processors with 128 simultaneous threads, you have the makings of a very decent drop in place database server which can easily handle thousands of transactions).
