Infrastructure Software

Anybody know if they are going to create a subscription that a professor can afford? Sadly I will have to move off of Solaris (after 10 years) if they don't.

Is this what you were looking for??

[Solaris-10 Subscription|http://www.filibeto.org/~aduritz/truetrue/solaris10/Solaris_Biz_Model_FAQ_Final.pdf]

I don't think that page is current.

Sadly it is not... If they kept that model I would be happy....

Price per cpu does not work for me either. 4 ultra sparcs in my Blade and r280, 2 amds in my x2200, 1 amd in my ultra20m2... I would be looking at over 700 dollars a year for just security updates from what I see so far. Ubuntu and zfs fuze it will be if that happens and that makes me very very sad. I have no need for 'service and support', just updates for an educationaly purposed group of machines running non-critical apps.

Oracle Premier Support for Operating Systems seems to be 390 euro.

Hi,
Where did you find thi price?

Cheers
Richard

It was part of a quotation I saw for a Sun x86 server.

Hi,
As I understand it system support is 12% of the hardware cost and Solaris only support is 8% of hardware cost.
There is now no fixed price for Solaris support.

Cheers

This is correct.

Still, entitlements to run older versions of Solaris are still in place (at least according to my Oracle Reps). For example, if you currently run Solaris 10 Update 8 (Now called Oracle Solaris 10.8) or older, you may continue to do so. However, you have no entitlements to patches or updates without purchasing one of the support agreements.

Here is something else I found interesting...when Oracle Solaris 10.9 is released, there will be no entitlements or support for it on non-Oracle hardware (this also from our account team), at least for the time being.

So if you don't purchase Oracle equipment, you can't get support for the latest Solaris release? Essentially - you must purchase hardware support to get OS support?

Correct.

To get OS support, one would be required to purchase Oracle hardware and Premier Support for Systems. Oracle has told us that, at this time, there will be no Solaris subscriptions available for non-Oracle hardware.

I wonder what, pray tell, will constitute "Oracle hardware". HP and Sun were partnered up for a long time - will our HP systems that are running Solaris now be considered "Oracle hardware", especially since they are already under an HP service contract? What about our 10 year-old SunFire servers? Will we need service contracts for obsolete equipment? These are hypothetical, of course - considering their current course, I assume the worst. I can't imagine what Oracle's goal here is, but I've never seen a company p*** off and drive away so many customers and destroy so much goodwill so fast, as Oracle has. I love Solaris for ZFS, primarily, as well as the service facilities (versus run scripts). Perhaps I'll migrate back to FreeBSD, or <shudder> Linux.

Hi

Par for the course I suppose. Over the last 3 years, the cost for Solaris basic support went from roughly $100 to $200 to $300 ($324 to be precise, or about EUR240 a year ago). So EUR390 would be about 50% higher cost.

Paul

is oracle trying to drive folks to oel? oracle support for the db side has gone downhill lately, not sure i wanna pay for much more from them.

Oracle will be renegotiating most, if not all, of their existing contracts with partners and OEMs. As customer support contracts expire and are renewed, they will be renewed into one of the new support offerings at the same price as the existing contract.

I've heard it said that Oracle will grandfather in hardware as long as it is currently under contract.

I've not been encouraged by the latest movements by Oracle. However, I can't say that I am surprised by it either.

Looks like HP servers are covered by HP:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13239_div/13239_div.pdf

That is if you want to run Solaris x64 on HP hardware call you're HP sales rep and they will sell you license, service & support.

We have HP contracts, I'll look into that. Thanks ajmaidak.

I received word from a trusted source yesterday that seemed to identify that Solaris 10.9 will be supported on non-Oracle platforms. Obviously, a fee would be assessed. However, there were few details included.

We can only hope for the best outcome.
Decision making cycles and uncertainty in regards to the availability of Solaris subscriptions on 3rd party hardware, don't really mix well in the business setting.

As much fun and joy it would be to have everything Sun all the way from hardware up, it is unfortunately not a reality at the customer sites.
Not always, not even most of the time. Specifically when it comes to x86.

It is extremely difficult to understand the post-acquisition reluctancy to sell support for Solaris OS.
From a common and business sense perspective.

Oracle is making it very, very difficult.
Please accept my dollars and let's move on with life.

In blunt words - if no 3rd party hw Solaris subscriptions available, then I will personally not recommend genuine Sun hardware either, when it would have been otherwise appropriate.
It is a zillion times easier to purchase a Red Hat subscription. Hardly in the interests of Oracle/Sun, is it.

Hi,

We are currently in the position of having to renew subscriptions. The whole process has been extremely painful so far. We have repeatedly asked for quotes, and after 2 months we finally had a price from Oracle.

We have 14 X4150 servers - list price was around £2-4K. I can't believe that we have been quoted £1k p.a for each server for OS support. This is nowhere near the 8% I have seen quoted. At this price we have to seriously consider dropping Solaris.

I wonder if others have had similar experiences?

That doesn't surprise me. Our Solaris subscription cost, pre-Oracle takeover, was about $800 per system. Our Red Hat EL subscriptions were about $1200 per system. I'm not shocked that the Solaris price went up. Someone suggested that if you have existing maintenance contracts, say with HP, they may be able to include that into the maintenance contract. We have HP support so I'm still checking into that here.

I had also heard that, but I thought that only applies to HP kit?

I was expecting a price increase, but not 500% (£1000 from £200). (approx. $300 up to $1400)

Because of the Solaris 10 licence change (from free to 90 day trial if you don't buy support), we in the academic community are dropping Solaris in favour of CentOS :(

Yes the license has changed, but we aren't using new licenses - we are renewing support for existing license that came with the hardware.

So we are also, unfortunately, coming to the same conclusion as you have - we need to use something else.

I will try to move my servers to opensolaris but I suspect I will have to move everything to linux in the end. Academics cannot pay for 'service' that we do not use nor need. Why not just let us have the critical patches like before? Particularly on sun machines!