Oracle softly increments SPARC M7 to M8, then whispers: We'll still love you, Solaris, to 2034

With little fanfare, Oracle formally tore the wraps off its SPARC M8 data-center-class processors and servers on Monday. The House of Larry Ellison unveiled the fifth-generation successor to the fourth-generation SPARC M7, along with five server models, and a commitment to support its Solaris operating system for at least …

[john.jones.name]

long term support its a FISMA thing...

Telecommunication and government contracts can not be won unless support is long term and on shore

(many are copying the USA FISMA approach).

I dont see Oracle winning as many of these as in the past unless they do something drastic

what would be really interesting would be the number of servers not upgraded and still vulnerable to EXTREMEPARR and EBBISLAND

the shadow brokers forced people to upgrade... which was nice...

http://john.jones.name

[Anonymous Coward]

"SPARC was already the fastest, most secure processor in the world for running Oracle Database and Java,"

About the only thing it does run these days.

[Loud Speaker]

Nope. It runs OpenBSD, and OpenBSD has "quite a lot" of packages.

[Anonymous Coward]

> OpenBSD has "quite a lot" of packages

Too bad nobody's using it. Except Motorola/ARRIS cable modems.

[chasil]

Not so

OpenSSH is a major component of OpenBSD. OpenSSH is the market-dominant UNIX ssh server distro.

Lots of other OpenBSD-centric technologies have moved into far larger markets.

[HCV]

tick tick tick

...and talk of delays for Solaris.next

Screven said during the webcast: "Fall of 2018".

That's pretty delay-ey. If they hit that mark, that'll be 3 years between Solaris 11.3 and Solaris.next. It'll be 7 years after Solaris 11. Can you feel the continuous delivery?

[Loud Speaker]

No big sze increase

No big size increase: I think that this may be a wise decision. Increased performance probably drives down the size of the market for bigger systems - so the really big users can buy more than one and keep the volume up of the models there are to service the "middle size" users. (If you need one of these, you are a already big user by most definitions anyway).

[Hans 1]

Come out early ?

So I guess all this gossip of Solaris/Sparc being slowly put to rest has made BigRed release the chip somewhat earlier ...

Apparently, Oracle is pushing Solaris/Sparc for the high end ... let's see what will come out of this.

They reduced the socket count and increased the clock speed ...hm ...cannot wait to see how many SAPS the M8-8 can pump out ...

[Fenton]

Re: Come out early ?

Pity they have only 7 years left of selling to the SAP market well actually probably only another 2 to 3 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come out early ?

Merely firing people after their work (tweaks to SPARC) was complete. Note that they no longer work there, so expect future improvements to be slower.

[jelabarre59]

it'll take that long

So supporting Solaris for another 17 years; is that because it will take some companies that long to complete their migrations off of it?

[J. R. Hartley]

Nice and expensive, yet a dead end.

Perfect for running AmigaOS 4

[arctic_haze]

Oh, the 2038 Unix end-of-time problem

Is it already time to put "The end is nigh" signs on the lawn?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh, the 2038 Unix end-of-time problem

Lawn? signs like that are scrawled on brown cardboard and held in the hands...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh, the 2038 Unix end-of-time problem

That was a 32-bit problem. 64-bit is good until 292,277,026,596 AD.

[GoldCoaster]

There will never be an M9, the M8 was already built before Oracle fired everyone in Sparc and Solaris so may as well release it for a final bit of revenue.

Sparc & Solaris are pretty much irrelevant and dead now, sadly. Saying it will be supported until 2034 is lip-service if its no longer developed, who would be mad enough to buy this stuff now, certainly no new customers.

Its a bit like the mainframe, a lingering slow death for years.

[chasil]

Disliking RISC

Everybody seems to love it when I post this link.

https://www.jwhitham.org/2016/02/risc-instruction-sets-i-have-known-and.html