“The Sudden Death and Eternal Life of Solaris” is a blog article by Bryan Cantrill with his thoughts on Oracle’s recent staff terminations.

This tweet by Simon Phipps claims that a large portion of Solaris technical staff were let go – as a “Silent EOL” of the product – in the recent Oracle layoffs on Friday, September 1st.

An article at Phoronix discusses more recent layoffs in Sun/SPARC-related teams at Oracle.

According to this Ars Technicha article, Oracle is officially cancelling any plans for Solaris 12, instead focusing on what they call “Solaris 11.next”, which is expected to be released in late 2018 and last through 2021.

In what I think is a really stupid decision on Oracle’s part, the SUN.COM website is going away after June 1, 2011.

(March 30th Update: Thanks to Jerry Kemp for pointing out an update where it is clarified that SUN.COM will not be going away, and 1:1 redirects will be in place)

Thanks to donations from supporters and people whose websites I host, the hardware for the new ohno.mrbill.net server is in place and the Comcast Business Class line with static IPs was installed yesterday. The current server will remain in-place until the end of the year, giving me plenty of time to migrate content without having to rush. I will also be hosting two “machines” (converted to VMs) for a friend on this system; he has paid for a good part of the hardware and is paying for the Comcast installation fee in exchange.

Antec Sonata Proto case, Corsair VX450 power supply, Gigabyte motherboard, AMD Athlon II x4 640 CPU, 8GB RAM, and pairs of WD Caviar Blue 250G and Caviar Green 1TB drives each mirrored in a RAID-1 configuration.

Oracle has announced new Sun SPARC Enterprise-T systems at Oracle Openworld in San Francisco.

Highlights of the new systems:

• SPARC T3-1B: single-socket 16-core CPU @ 1.65Ghz, blade, up to 128G RAM
• SPARC T3-1: Single-socket 16-core CPU @ 1.65Ghz, 2RU form factor, up to 128G RAM, eight or sixteen 300G 2.5″ SAS drives
• SPARC T3-2: Dual-socket 16-core CPUs @ 1.65Ghz, 3RU form factor, up to 256G RAM, up to six 300G 2.5″ SAS drives
• SPARC T3-4: Quad-socket 16-core CPUs @ 1.65Ghz, 5RU form factor, up to 512G RAM, up to eight 300G 2.5″ SAS drives

According to this article, Oracle and NetApp have agreed to settle their patent dispute regarding ZFS.

“Announced this morning via NetApp’s website, the companies have agreed to dismiss their pending patent litigation, which began when NetApp sued Sun Microsystems in September of 2007 and became Oracle’s problem when it acquired Sun last year. NetApp and Oracle are tight-lipped about the matter only stating that they both “seek to have the lawsuits dismissed without prejudice” and that the terms of the agreement are confidential.”

According to this Register article, IBM is ceasing sales of Solaris 10 on its x86-64 hardware as of August 27th. It is not clear at this time whether Oracle has pulled IBM’s OEM license (as it did with HP), or if IBM is making this change on its own. Dell is now the only remaining third-party vendor of Solaris on x86 hardware.

Oracle has released an updated Solaris Roadmap with details on the future of Solaris and OpenSolaris.

Some excerpts:

Oracle will continue to make OpenSolaris available as open source and Oracle will continue to actively support and participate in the OpenSolaris community

Oracle is investing more in Solaris than Sun did prior to the acquisition, and will continue to contribute innovative technologies to OpenSolaris, as Oracle already does for many other open source projects

Solaris 10 Next update CY2010 (“Update 9”)

OpenSolaris Next update 1st half CY2010

Bordeaux for OpenSolaris: for running MS programs without full Windows OS

Fluendo DVD Player for OpenSolaris

The way-long-overdue SUNHELP.ORG server upgrade is completed. Last night I migrated everything from the old Sun E420R (4x450Mhz US-II, 4G RAM, dual 18G disks) to the new T1000 (8-core 1Ghz UltraSPARC T1, 8G RAM, 1T SATA disk). Everything appears to be running fine so far.

Thanks to everyone for their patience. I intended to do this last June/July, but the death of my wife threw things for a loop and it fell to the back of my priorities list for a while.

Oracle will be holding a webcast detailing its plans for Sun on Wednesday, January 27 starting at 9am PT.

“Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components – hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications – engineered to work together.”

In related news, the European Commission has unconditionally approved Oracle’s purchase of Sun.

Sun’s stockholders have voted to approve the agreement where Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash.

According to this article from internetnews.com, the Department of Justice will not fast track approve the Oracle-Sun merger due to concerns over Java. However, Oracle’s legal counsel ensures compliance with all of the DoJ concerns.

According to this article in the New York Times, Sun may have stopped development of the “Rock” CPU ahead of its acquisition by Oracle. However, some of the comments indicate otherwise.