In the year 2010

Another year have passed with lots of changes for Solaris users, some of them good but others quite bad. Most of them are of course related to the Oracle acquisition of Sun which completed January 2010.

The not so good things:

• OpenSolaris is dead
• We no longer have insight into the development of Solaris.next
• We no longer have access to the latest ON source.
• Oracle have lost many brilliant and well known engineers from Sun

Oracle is clearly focusing on Solaris but not in the open kind of way that we go used to with OpenSolaris. As I have written before, this will probably make lots of money for Oracle in the short run, but how can it grow the the Solaris customer base as the OpenSolaris model could?

On the bright side:

• Solaris 11 Express 2010.11, the pre-release of Solaris 11 due next year
• illumos, the community driven ON source gate
• Oracle begun to share some Solaris/SPARC roadmaps this fall
• SPARC T3, 16 cores with great throughput but with limited single thread performance

Solaris 11 Express is in reality a rebranded OpenSolaris 2011.11 release and has a huge amount of new features and enhancements compared to the last OpenSolaris release. The SPARC T3 is a good processor for highly threaded applications and we have seen roadmaps with a T4 coming next summer with three times faster single thread performance.

In 2010 the sparcv9 blog have had over 40 000 visitors counted as "unique" by statcounter. Happy new year everyone!