Oracle revealed the future of Solaris in an internal memo that was released on August 11, 2010. In it, Oracle committed to redouble their efforts to get their database and application customers to utilize Sun Solaris, Sun SPARC servers, and Sun storage as part of a complete solution.
There are many operating systems for Oracle's enterprise customers to choose from including Linux, AIX, HP-UX, and Microsoft Windows. In order to convince Oracle's customers to pick Solaris, SPARC servers, and StorageTek storage solutions instead of the competitor's offerings, Solaris will need to run well on other hardware and run everyone's application. At the same time, Solaris needs to be optimized to run Oracle's own database and application software offerings better than other operating systems.
Oracle Customers Using Solaris
Using raw numbers from the Oracle memo, only 40% of its customers use Solaris. This means there is a huge opportunity to sell the Solaris 11 operating system and Oracle hardware. That will only happen if Solaris 11 becomes the best of breed Unix operating system.
The challenge for Oracle is to get customers to move from cheap multicore Intel CPUs running Linux to the SPARC platform running Solaris 10 or Solaris 11 on the basis of extra performance. However, the current pricing of many of Oracle's products is based on CPU cores, which gives it extra leverage to push customers towards its own SPARC CPUs.
Release Date for Solaris 11
Oracle plans to release a Solaris 11 binary distribution, which will be called Soalris 11 Express by the end of calendar year 2010. It will come with a free developer RTU license. An optional support plan is expected to be offered at that time. Updates will be released subsequently which will eventually lead to the eventual full release of Solaris 11 in calendar year 2011.
The End of Oracle and OpenSolaris
Because Oracle intends to put all of its resources into releasing Solaris 11, there will be no more binary releases including those tied to OpenSolaris 2010.05 or later. Oracle intends to provide a means for those customers who are running OpenSolaris today to migrate over to Solaris 11 Express. On August 23rd, 2010, all members of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) resigned and the control of the project reverted to Oracle due to bylaws set up beforehand with Sun Microsystems.
These moves by Oracle shows its committment to Solaris and the SPARC CPU. However, it also likely means the end of Oracle's open source involvement with regards to Solaris. How this plays out with MySQL and OpenOffice remains to be seen.
