Hi all,

Just curious, is Solaris still being sought after by IT companies?

See this wikipedia page on Opensolaris.

There are still reasons one might purchase a SPARC system and run Solaris yes.


http://www.oracle.com/us/products/se...iew/index.html


Sales pitch sure but companies still use it.

Solaris is still developed by Oracle, but OpenSolaris support has ended. OpenIndiana, with Illumos, effectively replaced it.

There is no doubt Solaris is less used as a desktop / generic OS but it is definitely still used and actively developed in specialized/high-end servers, have a look to engineered systems like Oracle SuperCluster and also Oracle ZFS storage appliances.

There are two projects which could be considered "Solaris". The first one is Oracle Solaris which is proprietary and the other ones are illumos-based such as OpenIndiana and SmartOS.

The OI guys put out development snapshots in their hipster branch. They made a snapshot a few weeks ago, so if you're interested, give one a try.

http://dlc.openindiana.org/isos/hipster/?C=M;O=D

In the enterprise, I'd guess most of the new stuff would be hosted on Linux as Oracle tends to be a bit expensive.

Oracle has wanted to sell turnkey database systems for a lo-o-ong time. Since acquiring Sun, they've now got an operating system they can tailor the way they want to optimize how it and their RDBMS work together without having to get buy-in from those pesky Linux kernel developers.

Of the commercial UNIXes I see mentioned in job listings, Solaris is probably the most mentioned. Not sure if that's an indication of Solaris having healthy sales or whether it means there are a lot of people migrating to Linux+cloud from existing/legacy Solaris systems. I've seen a lot of listings from sites that I know are -- or were -- heavily AIX-based that are currently engaged in that kind of migration. That just might be the case for the listings I see that are looking for Solaris+Linux experience.