Thread regarding Oracle Corp. layoffs

X86 isn’t really a “hardware business”, it is the result of technology ripped off from tech companies by China and sold dirt cheap around the world. IT is not fast or power efficient. It is cheap. Hence no requirement for a service contract just hire a lackey to unrack it and throw it away once it breaks for any reason. Not a very green stragedy but large corporations are not green they only care about the bottom line.
Linux is a OS that was “enhanced” when IBM stole the source code from Solaris and inserted it into Linux. It isn’t very secure because it was supposed to be maintained by the users. That is not what it is it is a cheap way to deploy enterprise OS on the cheap amp eating over deployed servers purchased from China. All you have to do is take a look at the home land security bug database which shows hundreds of open security holes in Linux to be very scared.

And as far as the OP is concerned regarding how much longer the server team has before it is axed I'll say this. Larry can't possibly axe the Sun remnants soon enough.

Why would he do that to a profitable business? Sure, if it ran a loss year after year, then sure. But it turns a decent profit. LE won't be shutting it down anytime soon.

Someone said: “And yes, all the Sun guys that stayed on with Oracle walked around like they each, personally, invented the Internet”

Hahahaha, so true!!!!!!!!

"To the guy who was talking about the Sun “warts”: Are you suggesting that instead of the “legend” that Sun fanbois are wedded to, instead Sun is, was, and always has been a POS?"

The guy's response below to this question didn't go far enough, so I'll go ahead and say it.

Yes, Sun is, was, and always has been a POS.

And as far as the OP is concerned regarding how much longer the server team has before it is axed I'll say this. Larry can't possibly axe the Sun remnants soon enough.

To the guy who was talking about the Sun “warts”: Are you suggesting that instead of the “legend” that Sun fanbois are wedded to, instead Sun is, was, and always has been a POS?

Not exactly. As a business that existed in order to make $ they did that well for awhile. However, that was largely based on being in the right place at the right time (internet growth) rather than tech excellence. That's the thing, that someone else just rightly pointed out, that these fans of "the good old days at Sun" absolutely don't understand. And the love for solaris is because for most of these starry-eyed folks, SunOS/Solaris was the first unix OS they learned. That coupled with the lucky timing in the market, make them think solaris was awesome, when in fact it wasn't.

The servers w/ ECC did not come until sometime long after the Cray acquisition. The sun fans also seem to forget that the E10K was not invented at Sun. And sure, sun eventually shipped servers with ECC memory, but not until thousands were on line at customers running with the parity c-ap. Sun had no answer for these irate customers, because the servers were fundamentally flawed. I can't imagine how many brand-new CPU boards we had to give away - I especially recall countless of those trashy "deskside servers", where we would have to swap boards out and eat the cost, not that it did any good - there was no fix for that parity issue. And frankly, I don't give a rat's *** about which architecture was which - none of them were all that great.

Then, as far as SunOS/Solaris "goodness" and the statements I made about mediocre hardware, I remember another example when the web-server market was taking off, where Sun was struggling with TCP/IP connection performance (their IO was always poor relative to competitors). There would be these bake-offs with other vendors where performance was measured using loadrunner. I don't remember the exact TCP/IP spec, but there's one where the stack is supposed to throw an error if the same port # is re-used too soon after a previous request from that server - reason being that you need to allow a time window for re-transmission of packets, and any new request with the old port # risks trampling over data that is being retransmitted somewhere on the net. Anyway, loadrunner was out of spec and would re-use the port #s willy/nilly. Sun, instead of throwing TCP errors would ignore these, because it made their #connections/second look higher. Then, when customers would put these servers into production they would be disappointed because the performance was so bad.

And the "greymarket" argument - as if that was Sun's undoing. BS. Sun's undoing was stubborn refusal to develop scalable x86 iron. That would have been a total differentiator that would have extended Sun's life way past the internet boom, but the execs were too spineless to make that bet-the-company decision, and paid dearly for the blunder.

But again- all this is too ugly for the "fanbois" to stomach. Sun was probably their first job, sparc was probably their first hardware experience, and the company was their first real experience with unix. The artificially fueled growth makes them think that they had something to do with the success, along with their great hardware and software, and their lack of experience with technology keeps them believing that hype even to this day.

The tech was revolutionary

Keyword: "was"

Sun developed NFS, NIS, JAVA, The Sunray (which was faster than the Dell terminal), ZFS, Zones, WABI....

And how many of that list made them any money? Yes, Sun developed a lot of free software over the years. Free doesn't pay the rent. This is one of the reasons Sun was losing money (literally millions per day is what we heard) by the time the acquisition was finalized.

And yes, all the Sun guys that stayed on with Oracle walked around like they each, personally, invented the Internet. Must have been quite a shock when they were faced with the reality of bringing in revenue.

As someone said, no one cares about Solaris or SPARC, except those few companies still running it. You are not attracted any new customers.

Sun had its day, but it was over long before Oracle bought them.

I’m an engineer. I worked at many Silicon Valley hardware and software companies, including a (thankfully short) stint at Sun. This gave me perspective that the folks in the sun bubble did not have. Maybe it was sparc 3 and not sparc 2.

There was no sparc 3. There was a sun3 that came out in the 1980's. There never was a model or architecture with the nomenclature of sparc 3 Sparc 2 sparc 10 sparc 5 sparc 20. All desktops. Sparcserver 600MP, Sparcserver 1000(e) Sparc center 2000 servers then it went right to Ultrasparc. 6000 5000 4000 3000 servers Ultrasparc1 Ultrasparc 2 desktops

the 6800/ on down had Dynamic reconfiguration and Error correcting memory. they were released in 2001

Architectures went sun4c/d/m/e/u/v

To the guy who was talking about the Sun “warts”: Are you suggesting that instead of the “legend” that Sun fanbois are wedded to, instead Sun is, was, and always has been a POS?

Solaris has some great technologies but they didn't pay attention to the customers. They should have built the software based on customer needs not based on what the architects wanted.

"Think of the the self-important employees running around Corp in their sandals, bringing their dogs and kids to the office as alternative daycare.. "

This was probably unnecessary and makes you seem like an ignorant, self-important douche.

“I don't think you know what you are talking about.”

I’m an engineer. I worked at many Silicon Valley hardware and software companies, including a (thankfully short) stint at Sun. This gave me perspective that the folks in the sun bubble did not have. Maybe it was sparc 3 and not sparc 2. Who cares? Regardless, the first servers were running workstation chips, and they used parity memory and they crashed all the time. Not sure how anyone could forget that part. They were c-ap. Many many customers were irate.

NIS - who cares? NFS? Overrated, no descent distributed file system tech. Java - I will give you that, though it is now poisoned. EFS? Way late to the party - I think XFS had already been added to Linux by then. 64 bit Solaris - came about 5 years later than it should have. Containers? Same thing - with cheep x86 available, VMware etc they did not help gain share - it was too late.

X86 ? Now there was a squandered chance to incorporate CC NUMA arch when Andy B came back. That would have been a bridge from the high margin big iron down to the commodity x86 world, but sun didnt want to cannibalize the high margin iron so limited those Andy B systems to 4 or 8 CPUs. However, since you have the limited scope of a long time sun guy I don’t expect you to understand that. Bottom line- this was a colossal strategic botch and no doubt the final nail in sun’s coffin

Thing is, this is all moot. Sun is dead, for all practical purposes. And you are just like so many ex-sun guys I know, who only seem to remember the “good old days” before the wheels flew off, and are incapable of seeing any of the warts, which were all over the place.

Wow, you really don’t know what you don’t know. E.g. SPARC II based servers with parity RAM. Those s—ers were crashing right and left from about 2000 to 2003. Sun NEVER recovered.

I don't think you know what you are talking about. SPARC II was a desktop, it was never designed to be a server. If you are using it as a server then you are not using it for what it was designed. Like using a Chevrolet Malibu to pull a backhoe. Second, if you were using SPARC II in 2000 that would make them 9 years old and EOSL since they were released in 1991. Why would you put parity RAM in a DESKTOP? developed in 1991?
That is not what k–led Sun. After the dot com bust, there were so many servers (6000's and up) that flooded the grey market, nobody purchased new ones. Also, the reluctance to embrace linux and the delay in releasing an x86 line of systems didn't help either.

Sun developed NFS, NIS, JAVA, The Sunray (which was faster than the Dell terminal), ZFS, Zones, WABI....the problem was the arrogance that they didn't need to sell and woo customers and the subborn refusal to change with the times. Better doesn't always win.

“Why is Larry investing on commodity server designs using x86? Any clues?”

Dementia?

The tech was revolutionary, often ahead of its time.

Wow, you really don’t know what you don’t know. E.g. SPARC II based servers with parity RAM. Those s—ers were crashing right and left from about 2000 to 2003. Sun NEVER recovered.

I’d call that a great example of a problem that even IBM had figured out how to solve, yet sun was caught flat-footed by. And that is just one of many examples. Sun’s success was purely accidental - happened to be there when startups were throwing away VC $$.

“ Sun has always had mediocre to poor technology that was marketed well.”

You have that backwards. The tech was revolutionary, often ahead of its time. Solved a ton of problems for countless large orgs in finance, ISPs, manufacturing, etc. It was the marketing and the message that was a problem.

Why is Larry investing on commodity server designs using x86? Any clues?

blah, blah, Solaris 11, blah, blah, ...

You’re a fan of sloaris? Fitting that you care so much about tech that no longer has any market relevance. Are you the OP refugee?

I hate to break it to you but nobody cares about sloaris anymore. It is dying a slow death, just like sun and just like oracle. If I were you I would update my resume ASAP. Surely there’s a glut of job ops out there for someone with your technical qualifications.

Why are we building our own x86 servers? Why invest in commodity technology based on Intel design?

@mnc+16wPBKGc Total id–t pointing out any negative aspect of Solaris over the years. Sounds like a second class tech talking about older OS technologies like patching which Solaris 11.x does not even have. Think of the fact the fact you can update Solaris 11 live these days without effecting the running OS and boot to multiple environments . Think about the incredibly scalable and fault tolerant ZFS file system that was developed for Solaris . Think about the both hardware and software virtualization technologies built into it. Think of all the performance wins on Sparc and Solaris over the years.

The sooner we cut bait with sun the better. That acquisition was the beginning of the decline. Sun has always had mediocre to poor technology that was marketed well. Think back to sparc 2, without ecc memory and the resulting nightmare as it powered countless servers (instead of the workstations it was really designed for). Think of the pain in getting to a 64bit os, when every “lesser” competitor had already done it. Think of the convoluted and painful patching process for sloaris. Think of the refusal by mcsquealy, bechtolsheim, etc to adopt ccnuma as a bet the company architecture, even after the amd partnership. Think of the the self-important employees running around Corp in their sandals, bringing their dogs and kids to the office as alternative daycare.. Think of open-source ponytail Schwartz spending $1B for MySQL, a company with a $20M/year revenue stream. Sun was a joke, is now a joke, and needs to be taken out back to the woodshed and ended.

To the OP, you have at least taken the first step, admitting that you are a hanger-on and therefore have a problem. That’s a start.

Years?