All hands meetings being cancelled on orders from legal to prevent news from spreading.
Hardware teams being told to cease development.
There will be no Solaris 12, final release will be 11.4.
Orders coming straight from Larry.
No info on timing yet.
Good thread on SPARC pricing (this is one of the problems here): @KCUvLPL or go to thelayoff.com/t/KCUvLPL
What are te likely sites that will get RIFs? Lots of sparc work in Burlington.
https://www.twitter.com/TheLayoff/status/804401797989285888
This is long overdue. Solaris was superior to a ton of Unix flavors that were floating around at the time. Yet, once Linux became prominent this advantage of Solaris went away. I am not going to go into enterprise strength and sales tactics here - that played a huge part here and that show is over (everyone is moving to AWS).
@2gid the consensus here is that we'll see a 50% reduction, a good chunk of the cuts already took place. The remaining 50% will take care of the DCs
Understandably everyone is upset but how many jobs are we really thinking will be RIF'd because of this? Why would they can so many hw jobs if sparc will be in the dc. They will have to keep development going wouldn't they? I could naive. I'm newer rcg.
Or we can always just start using OpenBSD
https://www.openbsd.org
http://www.openbsdfoundation.org
Sun should've focused on hardware and made the OS totally free. Perhaps went back to the BSD philosophy of SunOS. Sun hardware was awesome.
@-2bzh
What hw resources do you think?
Will R&D for sparc get hit?
Some well written insight. Everyone needs to start job hunting. Good luck.
@2xzd - all your quotes are from 2014, and many many many things changed over last 24+ months - Larry woke up (finally) and saw the cloud.... Look at all his recent moves including hiring Hurd - he wants to go into layoff / contraction mode on HW and legacy SW and bets big on Cloud (NetSuite, etc.) Oracle is hiring like crazy right now - if you have Azure or AWS skills they are ready to pay a hefty premium and bring you on board.
With this being said, anything Sun and anything Solaris is just an afterthought - had it not been for Sun HW in Oracle DCs this (layoffs) would have happened long time ago. Now, due to the DC presence the team at least have some hope of keeping some resources around.
RIP Solaris
Thanks for all the FUD...
About that roadmap: " It is not a commitment to deliver any material, code, or functionality, and should not be relied upon in making purchasing decisions. The development, release, and timing of any features or functionality described for Oracle’s products remains at the sole discretion of Oracle."
We knew this long time ago, does AMD Opteron release ring the bell? This was almost released almost 15 years ago, it was EXTREMELY cheap, was running on Linux, it was darn fast.
I am sorry for all jobs lost and I am 1000% confident that the team members being canned will be able to find better and more rewarding jobs once they are released.
Good luck!
I have never seen so many views to one post. Hot topic. RIF news will come forth but there was no timeline given on impacts of the canceled projects.
What about the Sun/Solaris roadmap published recently?
http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/servers/sparc/oracle-sparc/sparc-roadmap-slide-2076743.pdf
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/07/oracle_outlines_solaris_sparc_roadmaps/
Also see:
SPARC and Solaris will live until at least 2019
Oracle reveals three generations of silicon and Solaris 12 release schedule
And:
Optimists will be pleased that Oracle appears to have three generations of silicon in mind and appears committed to SPARC until 2019 and beyond.
Pessimists might wonder if the “core enhancements” due around 2019 represent a worryingly vague statement of direction and/or intent.
The planned 2017 and 2018 enhancements to thread strength and throughput also look incremental compared to the heftier enhancements planned for 2015 and 2016, which could be worrying for those who need SPARC to scale.
https://twitter.com/TheLayoff/status/804401797989285888
ZFS and their fairly solid dedicated SPARC support are pretty much the only redeeming qualities of Solaris (right now - used to be different).
Oracle has a Midas touch, they kill everything they buy - this is happening with Sun products and Solaris is not an exemption.
Both Intel and ARM ship with "management engines" that a vendor can use to take control of a computer.
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3085494/security/intel-management-engines-security-through-obscurity-should-scare-the-out-of-you.html
Oracle/SUN released the SPARC T2, which lacks such an engine. It's the only CPU that can be trusted.
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/systems/opensparc/opensparc-t2-page-1446157.html
I would like to see this CPU in a Raspberry-Pi form factor. Speed is not material.
Solaris is also quite strong - zones are far more capable than systemd-nspawn, and zfs continues to rule the realm of file systems.
These are great products, and Oracle is failing to properly capitalize them. They are open, and someone else should.
I read somewhere that Sparc goes before Solaris. Has there been any RIFs in Sparc in this week?
How many hw dev teams will be canned? If sparc is in the dc won't they need many? Volume server dev team?
@KBEVoB1-2uie Well we can always just start using FreeBSD
Guys, don't name names, site rules. Admins will remove your posts and block your IP. Happened to me while ago, still on proxy, super slow.
I know this may be surprising, even sad. Yet, if you observe Larry's direction he's clearly doubling down on cloud - full force and without restrictions.
Just observing hiring patterns and recruiter behaviour - they are pouring insane money in bonuses and total comp for any human with a pulse and basic knowledge of Azure and/or AWS.
Personally I think that it is going to be an uphill battle as Oracle is so late here - the ship has sailed...
Some valid points about sparc making up all the oracle data centers. What kind of development teams will they keep? High volume server dev?
RIP Sun
My sincere condolences
I loved you!
are you a joke?
Maybe Joyent is hiring, but be warned, Bryan is done saving UltraSPARC.
So Joyent + SmartOS on intel + unbelievably exorbitant pricing + closing the source code finally beat Snoracle into submission?
Go SmartOS / illumos on intel: a better Solaris than Solaris. Cheap, fast, open source, free.
Oracle never knew how to deal with Sun other than suing about Java and slowing down MySQL.
@2vtn on the chip side, Intel and Qualcomm went through a major meltdown this year, just check out their boards - there are literally mountains of reports of layoffs going all the way back to 2014 - nobody is hiring
Wim Coeckaerts went back to Oracle for a reason.
That bad?! How many people? Time for a career change guys. I worked in tech years ago. It's not going to get any better.best of luck to all of you.
There will be blood.. (in all HW teams).
Just hope Intel, qualcomm, etc are hiring..
Will this affect other HW teams?
How much sparc dev will that entail?
Oracle will be a SaaS only company and will retain only enough hw people to build its DCs, everything else is history
Show me the latest sparc roadmap? I haven't been able to find it.
LE can't admit his failure in acquirinG Sun but he will still try and cancel things like his plan to release Solaris 12. He shared this with industry and now it's canceled. How does that look to an outsider?
Most likely development will slow down to meet market demand if T is only roadmap left for Sparc they will cut hardware teams deep and R&D. The cost for developing a chip is more than you think. With Fujitsu getting out of sparc and opting for ARM in the future this will increase dev costs. Again unsustainable business model to rely in sparc for all data center. Stinkin ship unless they find a new strategy. Besides market share is eroding for database as well. Profit margins will shrink and only so many companies to acquire until you go broke.
How many US sites does this impact? This will be just the beginning. Expect more project cancelations,RIFs and consolidations( redundancy reductions) MH does this for his morning workout as he did at HP. You see how it's going for HP.