back to article Oracle quietly extends Solaris 11.4 support until 2037

Oracle has quietly extended paid support and upgrades for Solaris 11.4 to 2037 – three years past its previous deadline – and did the same for earlier versions of the OS last year. Solaris is a proprietary Unix that Oracle acquired along with Sun Microsystems in 2010. Teamed with Sun's own SPARC silicon, the OS was an …

  1. ldo Silver badge

    It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

    I suppose if you’ve found your own little pool of the “More Money Than Sense” brigade, you might as well soak them for as much as you can get, for as long as you can.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

      When you're running truly big workloads, there are situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

      And, of course, even if you could use Linux, when you've spent a few millions on hardware and application licenses why would you rip them all up and start again just to get effectively the same thing if you don't have to?

      1. ldo Silver badge

        Re: situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

        Linux scales to millions of CPU cores in the world’s most powerful supercomputers. No other OS can compete in that league.

        > when you've spent a few millions on hardware and application licenses why would you

        >rip them all up and start again just to get effectively the same thing if you don't have to?

        Because Oracle is continuing to soak you for ongoing support and licensing fees.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

          "Linux scales to millions of CPU cores in the world’s most powerful supercomputers. No other OS can compete in that league."

          But that's not a single instance of Linux. In large clusters of servers used as supercomputers, scalability is due to the application more than the operating system.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

          Linux scales to millions of CPU cores in the world’s most powerful supercomputers. No other OS can compete in that league.

          Ah, someone who thinks "big" means just a few PB of data and lots of parallel processing.

          There's a world of a difference between an HPC application running on a million-core supercomputer, and a suite of business apps running on a very large mainframe-class business system. There are many sorts of scalability, Linux is excellent at some of them, but Solaris is still better for some of the others.

          Because Oracle is continuing to soak you for ongoing support and licensing fees.

          The cost of hardware maintenance and application licenses, which are much the same no matter what OS is running, dwarfs any difference between OS costs. The cost of throwing away working stuff just to replace it with other working stuff would be uneconomic.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

            Linux does scale to at least 768 cores and 48TB in the HPE Superdome Flex servers though. And IBM is moving its POWER servers from AIX to Linux. So single system image scaling of Linux is now quite competitive with the Sys V Unices. SGI IRIX had the largest SSI scaling with its Origin MIPS systems, to over a thousand cores, but its NUMA latencies made programming it problematic.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

              Windows Server scales to 64 CPUs just to note. Given 8 Sierra Forest Xeons in current server hardware, that's ~ 2,304 cores achievable.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

                There'sa big difference between "running" and "scaling". Running means not crapping your pants with a lot of cores. Scaling means leveraging these cores to do useful work. There is no universe - this one, or a parallel one, where Windows scales to 2000+ cores...

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: situations where Solaris is still far more capable than Linux.

                  Well the Windows micro-kernel always scaled better as a hypervisor than Linux based hypervisors. And that's a good test of kernel scaling to at least hundreds of cores.

          2. ldo Silver badge

            Re: large mainframe-class business system

            I know you meant well, trying to use that phrase “mainframe-class”, but remember that “mainframe-class” represents exactly the sort of batch mentality Sun and Unix were trying to get away from. All those brilliant, yet retired, Sun engineers, would be horrified to learn from you that they had failed.

            1. James Anderson Silver badge

              Re: large mainframe-class business system

              You obviously have never seen a real mainframe setup. 200 online transactions per second is quite normal when I last worked on one twenty years ago peaking at 350. I am pretty sure a modern Z series can at least double that. Plus at least 4 machines spread over two sites for 99.999 % availability ( the o.oo1% was unavoidable application upgrades ).

              There are just some problems you cannot solve by running lots of processes in parallel so you really need a powerful single instance. As of 2022 commodity intel chips can finally compete with OS/360 hardware in this space.

              Having said that the Solaris HA setups were equally impressive most of the ones I worked on outlived the companies they were built for.

              1. ldo Silver badge

                Re: You obviously have never seen a real mainframe setup.

                You really want to go there? OK ...

                Linux runs on real official mainframes, namely IBM zSeries machines. Solaris does not.

                Still want to go on about which is the “mainframe-class” OS?

                1. Anonymous Coward
                  Anonymous Coward

                  Re: You obviously have never seen a real mainframe setup.

                  Open Solaris was demonstrated on System z in the mid-late 2000s. IIRC, Oracle pulled support for development when it acquired Sun.

                  But returning to the original point, you don't seem to understand the nuance and complexity of different kinds of scalability, and while Linux is also a great OS, it doesn't need misguided fanboys to promote it.

                  1. ldo Silver badge

                    Re: Oracle pulled support for development

                    Gee, I wonder why. Something about not scaling beyond vapourware, to production environments, perhaps?

                    Remember, Linux is being used in “mainframe-class” production environments, Solaris is not.

                    1. Anonymous Coward
                      Anonymous Coward

                      Re: Oracle pulled support for development

                      Gee, I wonder why. Something about not scaling beyond vapourware, to production environments, perhaps?

                      No doubt a commercial decision. But perhaps you'd care to explain why Linux would scale better on zSystems.

                      Remember, Linux is being used in “mainframe-class” production environments, Solaris is not.

                      And also remember that the "mainframe-class" goodness — resource management, fault tolerance, etc. — comes from IBM's deep stack of proprietary software and hardware providing a virtual machine under the hood. Linux doesn't manage the hardware directly.

                      To Linux, the mainframe can appear as a tightly-coupled cluster of machines, so many instances of Linux can run efficiently without having to scale across a big system in one big system image.

                      1. ldo Silver badge

                        Re: why Linux would scale better on zSystems.

                        Because it actually runs on zSystems, Solaris does not. Remember we were talking about “mainframe-class” deployments, were we not?

                        > Linux doesn't manage the hardware directly.

                        It seems to manage that better than Solaris ever could. That’s what counts.

                        1. Anonymous Coward
                          Anonymous Coward

                          Re: why Linux would scale better on zSystems.

                          You were asked for your explanation of why (so you think) Linux would scale better than Solaris on a zSeries mainframe; you came back with a desperate appeal to the weak anthropic principle.

                          1. ldo Silver badge

                            Re: why Linux would scale better on zSystems.

                            “Anthropic principle” ... now there’s a “desperate appeal” to some pretty abstruse philosophical rationalization as to why one product failed in the marketplace and the other did not.

                            Remember, I was not the one who introduced the phrase “mainframe-class” into this discussion. I just ran with it.

            2. Roland6 Silver badge

              Re: large mainframe-class business system

              The big thing people were trying to get away from was a systems design paradigm established decades previously, where hardware was slow and expensive and thus batch was the only way to tackle big jobs. With the risk of fast, large (by the standards of the day) and cheap disks, faster and more capable processors and software. A new system design paradigm was possible - replacing those tape based databases and batch systems with an online disk-based relational database and transactional systems. The savings to be had were significant, for one client the overnight batch run changed from having to process the entire 5m customer (tape based) database every night to only having to access and process less than 200k customers assigned to that nights billing cycle. Obviously, once that customer data was accessible online, businesses were able to both mine it and to deliver new services to customers.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

        No-one is running Solaris on hardware built in the last 20 years. There are no "truly big workloads" on Solaris.

        You've got the occasional box running some crap that doesn't matter in the a corner of a room.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

          ROTFLMAO. When I left the Solaris team in Oracle 3 years ago we were still making and selling new hardware to new Solaris customers. Your comment really just shows that you haven't a clue about the real world of business.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

            Wow - you worked on Solaris that recently? What a waste of time.

            Solaris as an OS any one would want to use peaked in 1995 after which NT4 blew it out of the water as a Workstation. Even back in the early 2000s Solaris release notes were all "new in Solaris xxx introduced (copied from) in Linux in yyyy". By 2002 Linux had been bashed into a better shape than Solaris for most workloads. By 2006 there was basically nothing that Solaris was better than Linux for.

            Now I have a vague understanding that it's still available for licensing, in the same way as AIX still technically exists. Certainly we ended sales for the Solaris platform in 2010 (and that was after 5 years of no feature development).

            1. Roland6 Silver badge

              Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

              > Wow - you worked on Solaris that recently? What a waste of time.

              If it pays the bills and some, not such a waste of time…

              1. ldo Silver badge

                Re: If it pays the bills and some ...

                Sure. Like I said, it’s great to have a pool of the “More Money Than Sense” brigade to rely on ...

                1. Roland6 Silver badge

                  Re: If it pays the bills and some ...

                  Don’t knock it, the IT industry was founded and remains vibrant because such people are prepared to party with their money…

                  1. ldo Silver badge

                    Re: because such people are prepared to party with their money

                    Sure, but they don’t stay in business as long as those who see their IT spend more prudently, as a strategic investment.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

          “You've got the occasional box running some crap that doesn't matter in the a corner of a room.”

          You haven’t got a clue. If that was true, Oracle wouldn’t be extending support. It’s huge in Finance and Telecoms industries. Finance in particular where the pace of change is glacial.

      3. MeekMark

        Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

        I think there are some telecom industry applications that use Solaris.

        1. ldo Silver badge

          Re: some telecom industry applications that use Solaris.

          Could be. But is this the same telecom industry that is being disrupted by VoIP providers using open source software like Asterisk on Linux?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: some telecom industry applications that use Solaris.

            @Ido

            NO

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

        I agree, but in my experience most Solaris holdouts are applications that were originally built in the mid to late 90's when you really did need the specialised hardware and software to get the performance for your particular problem.

        Commodity hardware has caught up for anything in that space well and truly. Only the most niche and volume applications really need the levels you're suggesting. I have to say they are damn tasty machines, they fit that gap where an IBM Z is too much but commodity not enough.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

          Hardware may have caught up, but today’s system design paradigms are basically the same as those used in the 90s. Yes, we’ve now got web and cloud but we are still building client-server transactional systems.

      5. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

        Oh look, it's the mainframe idiots. They always pop up when they're least wanted.

        No, your mainframe is not faster than a rack of servers.

        No, "transactions" is not a measure of computer speed, nor is it in any way relevant. There's a reason why IBM never quotes actual benchmarks.

        No, your mainframe isn't faster at IO than a rack of servers either.

        Just stop. The fastest computers in the world are supercomputers running Linux.

    2. Ilgaz

      Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

      I think they would switch to *BSD.

  2. Fred Daggy Silver badge
    Pint

    I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

    2037, I see. Not going beyond that date, possibly because : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

    Don't see many being able to jump on the bandwagon and cash out with this one. All I would hope is to be on the correct side of the grass at that point.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

      Solaris 11 runs just fine beyond 2038. Solaris 10 may have problems if you're still running on UFS instead of ZFS.

      How well the Oracle database and related apps will survive is another story.

      1. karlkarl Silver badge

        Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

        I don't disagree.

        But the Lindy Effect is currently suggesting that Solaris 10 will likely be the last remaining OS on earth, outliving all of us.

        I mean, seriously, if I knew the lifespan that Solaris 10 was going to have in 2005, I would have absolutely prioritised it over even Linux. 20 years is almost an entire career length.

        1. munnoch Silver badge

          Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

          I really must upgrade my personal email server from Solaris 10 to 11...

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

            That's where Sun really shot itself in the foot. That "upgrade" requires a complete reinstall, and is one of the main reasons that so many people are still on S10 (and why not, it's still solid). After the SunOS→Solaris 2 move Scott McNealy promised that they'd never do that to customers again, but...

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

              A cynical person might wonder if McNealy knew he wasn't going to be around Sun forever, and wasn't terribly worried about 'promises'".

              "What? Oh, right -- sure, tell them we'll never require upgrade-reinstalls ever again. Schwartz can deal with that later...."

              Turns out it's Larry rather than Jonathan Schwartz, but whatever. Larry doesn't care either.

            2. Roland6 Silver badge

              Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

              It is worth noting Microsoft has made no such promises, since 2003/Xp it would seem their deliberate policy is to break things with each new release.

        2. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

          The lengthening of system lifespans as technology got better and matured is inevitable, just that some, particularly in sales and marketing are obsessed with “new” .

          The challenge is finding a way for a company to survive such timescales to provide on-going support and maintenance.

  3. Numen

    2037 makes sense

    Neatly avoids the 2038 time problem. Oracle won't be fixing that!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I think they should extend the support until Epochalypse (03:14:06 UTC on 19 January 2038) ... that would be nice Solaris sunset

  5. Lee D Silver badge

    If you're dumb enough to pay Oracle - of all companies - for a special extended licensing just for an antique OS, I'm guessing that money isn't a problem and you make a lot of bad decisions every day anyway.

    1. Wally Dug

      I'm guessing that money isn't a problem and you make a lot of bad decisions every day anyway.

      Have you ever been in an environment where Solaris and Sun hardware has been in use? Yes, it may very well be legacy now but in my experience, Solaris and Sun hardware, especially when running as a cluster, is pretty bombproof with uptimes running into the years (decades?) rather than days and weeks for Windows.

      It's not so much that "money isn't a problem" it's having the confidence and comfort of a having a rock solid platform to run your enterprise or mission critical applications, some of which may literally mean life or death to your customers/clients.

      I admit it's been a long time since I've had to look after a Solaris box to that extent, but I reckon there's still a fair few of them running away quite happily, doing what was promised of them in the 2010s, 2000s and even 1990s, hence why support has been extended.

      1. Lee D Silver badge

        "having a rock solid platform to run your enterprise or mission critical applications, some of which may literally mean life or death to your customers/clients."

        Which, to my mind, means something you can easily upgrade, replace, seek alternate support and don't have just one avenue / company for that who are notoriously for killing acquired products or stinging you into bankruptcy just to keep doing what you've been doing for decades.

        Sorry, but "uptimes running into the years (decades?)" is a BAD THING. It means you're entirely reliant on that system just keeping working and have never actually thought about what happens when it goes wrong, is no longer supported, needs to be moved to another city, etc. etc.

        1. Wally Dug

          Yes, you're right - many organisations are entirely reliant on their mission critical systems. But I'm pretty sure if that's the case, then I would hope the majority have a DR solution in place that is regularly tested, the plan is kept up-to-date etc. and the hardware may even be geographically spread out for load balancing, DR purposes, etc.

          And with all due respect, I'm unsure if one of my theoretical mission critical systems could be upgraded "easily" or replaced - rightly or wrongly - as the organisation would have made a major investment in it over the years. And the kind of organisation that is happy to spend millions on building, running and maintaining a mission critical system will happily pay for proper vendor (in this case Oracle) support rather than some kind of third-party service provider whose SLAs include the term "best endeavours".

          One of the organisations that I worked for in the past had a vendor's parts bank on-site with common spare parts, despite being promised a one hour delivery of any part, as their system really couldn't be down. And, yes, this system was fully clustered, fully redundant, full DR capability (with DR site being updated in real time), so shouldn't have needed any of that, but such was the value of the support contract and the clout of the organisation, the vendor happily agreed. (This was a shared parts bank. The vendor also had an engineer based on-site 24/7/365.)

          So, yes, maybe relying on a single vendor is bad from a financial point of view, but in some cases, it's not only the right choice, but the most prudent choice.

        2. ChoHag Silver badge

          Reliant on a system that's reliable? Oh noes...

        3. Roland6 Silver badge

          > Sorry, but "uptimes running into the years (decades?)" is a BAD THING.

          So the planes aren’t falling out of the sky often enough for your liking?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The problem isn't with Sun hardware or Solaris, both of which are excellent. The problem is Oracle, which has a per core licensing model that is so expensive you won't have any money left over to migrate to anything else.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Yes - we've all worked with Solaris

        25 years ago. It was pretty obsolete then too. Decent in 1995, though.

        Eventually the power supply blows up. Those caps were cheap garbage.

    2. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      antique OS

      The first Linux release (1991) was a year before Solaris 2 (1992).

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Yes, but Sys V Unix, on which Solaris 2+ is based, was released in 1983. The truth is that all the Unices and Linux are antiques, but in the way horseshoe crabs, dragonflies, and cockroaches are biological antiques. Primitive but they get the job done and are flexible enough to adapt to change.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Yes, but Sys V Unix, on which Solaris 2+ is based, was released in 1983.

          Which is also when Stallman launched GNU, the main userland base for Linux.

          Ouch, that makes me feel old.

    3. bazza Silver badge

      >(snip) just for an antique OS, (snip)

      Looks at Wikipedia's "Comparison of Operating Systems" page and struggles to find an OS that is 1) new, 2) cheaply supported, 3) mainstream. Finds.... nothing!

      It's quite an interesting list to look at, sorted by "Initial Public Release". The newest, truly fresh and potentially very significant OS going forward is Redox - a from-scratch OS development written in Rust. In case you've not seen it, it's work taking a look - it might be "The Future".

      What has impressed me the most about that project is just how quickly it went from nothing to a working graphical desktop, applications. It really hasn't taken them very long at all; I reckon they've written an awful lot of code really quite rapidly. That probably means Rust is pretty efficient in terms of developer time, which in turn probably indicates a future direction for all on-the-metal software projects; C/C++ are slower and riskier to develop for.

      Considering that several existing OSes (Windows, MacOS, even Linux) look to be in the process of getting Rustier, in time it's possible that several antique but very mature and widespread OSes could eventually wind up being majorly reimplemented for the modern age.

  6. CapeCarl

    "Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"

    Hmmm while working for a 300-person division of Time Inc at the beginning of the current millennia, I needed to reboot one of the $800K Sun 6800s due to a clock bug that showed up after (oddly) 520 days (not 512) on a beast that had uptime of almost 500 days...Per usual, at the weekly IT & biz team lead meetings, all the Windows team had to say to justify an outage was 2 words "Patch Tuesday". I on the other hand as the head of Solaris support had to justify to the Nth degree why I needed an outage (and produce a 50+ step MS Project plan detailing exactly how said reboot / maintenance window would be handled.)

    But hey, Solaris put my 2 daughters through college.

    1. Plest Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Re: "Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"

      I feel you! The Windows mob had SQL servers boucing up and down all week, we needed to boot a Solaris box running Oracle after 600 days uptime and we had 3 weeks of planning meetings to do a 5 min Saturday morning reboot!

      1. StripeyMiata

        Re: "Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"

        My record was a OpenVMS VaxCluster at 900 days.

    2. the spectacularly refined chap Silver badge

      Re: "Patch Tuesday" vs "Reboot one of the 6800s?: WTF!"

      Sounds like an lbolt bug, if I've done my sums correctly that would be after 497 days (assuming HZ is 100 which was pretty much universal on anything except Windows 9x back then). It shouldn't have affected Solaris at all but third party drivers may have had an issue.

      It one of those things well known to the grey beards of the time or those that spent proper time with them to soak up their knowledge. Most of the grey beards I knew are dead now.

  7. FirstTangoInParis Silver badge

    Rock solid

    During to 90s and 00s a small group of second user SparcStation 5s ran management applications for a travelling set of private networks. They travelled all over the world for some 13 years and never batted an eyelid. They would have run longer still if they hadn’t been forcibly retired. I dread to think of the care and feeding that a bunch of latter day Windows boxes would need to do that.

  8. Paul Crawford Silver badge

    And in 2018 Oracle just about confirmed that status by halting development of a major upgrade and freezing the OS at version 11.4, plus continuous patches and package updates.

    Don't you wish more OS would stop monkeying with adding new/shiny/shitty stuff and just keep fixing the known/working/stable system?

  9. Bebu
    Windows

    If you were "stuck" on Solaris 10...

    I noticed no one mentioned IllumOS, an open source derivitive of Sun's Opensolaris (from Solaris-10.)

    If you were running in house Sol-10 applications on amd64/x86_64 hardware then a IllumOS based distribution like OpenIndiana is likely to be binary compatible. Whether Oracle software would run under IllumOS is a $64 question.

    Porting software from Sol-10/sparc to amd64 is more likely to be more successful than to another OS eg Linux, *bsd.

    I know of an attempt to port scientific software to Linux from Solaris which after six months and 10s of $K was abandoned.

    In any case at the price, worth looking at. :)

    1. ptribble

      Re: If you were "stuck" on Solaris 10...

      It's "illumos". No capitals. Some of the team get quite picky.

      But yes, illumos continues the "just works without randomly breaking stuff on a regular basis" philosophy. Like Solaris, sits quietly in the background doing its job without requiring an army of squirrels constantly caring for it. Binary compatibility with Solaris 10 is excellent.

      Used for new and very cutting edge stuff, like Oxide and Helios.

      (Some of us are still running illumos on sparc. Now that is a bit niche, I'll admit.)

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hmm I wonder if Illumos will still be alive in 2037. There seems to be little news.

  11. naive

    Smart move from Oracle

    Marketing and subtly planned obsolescence convinced many people that everything has to constantly be upgraded and replaced.

    IT people specially love to dance to the music from Big IT, since participating in this scam party pays part of the rent.

    A company who bought in 1998 a Sun server with an app that does important tasks for them, can still use it today like they did in 1995.

    The amount of money they saved by using the same configuration, not spending fortunes on upgrades and 4-5 years replacement cycles, is enormous.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Slowlaris

    It's insane that anybody still uses Slowlaris today. But I suppose Oracle is really good at extracting money from suckers.

    The only advantage it's got over Linux is not having systemd.

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