Summary Oracle Sun Pricing/Support

Thanks for All guys who responded promptly.

My Question
=========

Hi Guys,

We are small education organisation, hosting 25 sun servers, we used to get
discount education pricing from sun but not now, give you example we bought
T5220 price 22k one year ago, now they give us quote for same system 80-90k
and others T3 systems also (they said no more discounts/education  pricing)
and jacked up the support pricing also.

We are thinking to move slowly, we are thinking to move Linux (Red
Hat/Fedora) and Dell Hardware (we can run VM if we need to run solaris). My
question is what you guys thinking before we give proposal to Management (I
know it depends on my requirments) and what you guys are thinking for future
of Solaris in your company (small/medium)?

Finally mention on support also, we are really having time wasting excercise
in oracle/sun support also , if we have hardware issue after give them every
information/errors/logs than they asked us to run this and that etc, finally
when we sorted out every think and than only engineer come  and replace part
(even though we have Gold support for Hardware/Software)...it was not before
means 2 yrs ago.

As compared to Dell, we just call support and the rest they do.

Yours input is really apprecaited

Regards

John

My Sumary from Posts
==================

Use HP for mission critical/IO/Network/DBs
Use RedHEL/Centos/Fedora for Java/other applicantions using any intel
hardware (Dell, HP etc)

Below is Responses

>From Julian
==========

We use Dell, HP and Sun hardware.  Redhat enterprise software is the
preferred OS.  If you can't afford Redhat the use CentOS which is
Redhat without the support.

>From Michael
============

Solaris will become Oracle RDB-centric over time.
The Oracle cost model is horrible.

I would recommend HP server over Dell servers.
While I prefer Dell laptops over HP laptops, the HP servers are head and
shoulders better than Dell servers.

RHEL is good and stable.
Developers around here tend to freak out when they have to change to
gcc--it's quite funny and a great time to poke them.

Oracle's Unbreakable Linux is developed from the RHEL software.



>From Luc I
==========
I would recommend to check HP as well. Then depends on what your application
needs are, you might want to check Ubuntu.

1. No need to newest stuff and can compile the things you need your self
then CentOS is not a bad option

2. Need good update stuff and want to do less compile things your self then
Ubuntu is a good option

The next would be how static does the server need to be disk and memory-wise
in a fairly static HP would be a better option, otherwise go Dell.
If you think/need to update the HW say every 3 years of less then Dell is
the better option. Sure there are other HW manufature out there but most of
these vendor are big volumes and short live-spand, they are use by company
such as Facebook and Yahoo, one goes down? we have 10 more in spare, no
big deal they are 'cheap' anyway type of things.

Couple other things to keep in mind
       1. IO performance needs, both with HP and Dell this will make
       the price go up as you will need better disk/controllers

       2. Network needs, same as IO and most Dell comes with only
       two interfaces, HP need to pick up the right model.

Also you must play Dell against HP for pricing! Otherwise you might end-up
paying too much, either choice...


>From Stanley
===========

I think you should consider yourself lucky that
Oracle even bothered to offer you a price quote. We have been moving away
from Sun hardware over the past two or three years to Red Hat Linux on
Dell servers (mostly blades) and we aren't looking back. I am responsible
for one sun T2000 now and that will likely be decommissioned next month,
at which point I will no longer have a need to be on the Sun managers list.

>From anonymous
===============

Obviously, you work on what I refer to as the 'business' side of
the institution.  I work on the 'academic' side of the
institition.  We've got a large Sun installation for a department
of our size, 99% of it with no hardware support.  We've also had
a site-license for  Solaris for going on 15 years, and Solaris
has worked quite well (for both instructional and research
purposes) for a long time.

One of the responses I sometimes provide when people ask me,
"What are you going to do now that Oracle has purchased Sun?",
is, "Are you familiar with AIX?"

In the early 90's AIX was quite popular in academia in this
country.  Eventually IBM abandoned the 'academic' side of this
universe (although, locally, it continues to run important stuff
on the 'business' side).  Today, AIX continues to be a nicely
profitable but not huge business for IBM.  And it runs a lot of
DB2.

I think Larry has IBM-envy.  Solaris is destined to become an
option for those who can afford it.  Solaris Express is for
hobbyists and, though what we do with Solaris in my department is
extremely modest in the grand scheme of things, I don't consider
that an option.  (Our expectations are larger than our means.)

The message is clear: You can continue to run Solaris if you can
afford it.  In our case, it is clear that the fact that we send
some few hundreds of students out into the world each year with
years of experience working on and with Solaris is of no value to
Oracle.

Obviously, my conclusion is that it's time to move to Linux (and
I'll guarentee you that it won't be Oracle's brand of Linux
...).

>From Joe
=========

SUN regarded Education as a loss-leader. They gave kit to the colleges with
a view to producing an army of students who knew and liked SUN kit and who
would take that on into whatever industries they ended up in.
As a strategy it worked very well.

Oracle don't share that view. They also care very little for the low end
market where the margins are slim.
Its very much a case of "If thou would'st use it then thou shalt pay".

I'd suggest that unless you have some overpowering driver to keep solaris
then you take the liinux route.
I'd probably buy HP hardware rather than Dell but that's just my personal
opinion.


>From Allan
========

We moved from Sun/Solaris to IBM Intel hardware and RHEL, because they
also have excellent support and we already had other IBM hardware. The
boss saw it as an easy thing to support since the hardware prices for
Intel-based systems were lower initially and for annual maintenance.
We're still supporting a couple Suns, and getting the annual maintenance
quote has been harder and harder. Institutionally, we don't trust that
Oracle will actually support us at the level we need for production
services any longer.


>From Ray Van
============


In my opinion, Sun/Oracle have surrendered the mid-size market to
Linux, Dell etc.  It just doesn't make sense to buy their hardware any
longer.

I like the stuff we have of theirs and we have a great FE that supports
us well, but Dell HW runs our workloads just fine and I can afford to
by two machines for the price of an equivalent Sun machine.

>From John
========

What are you doing that needs a SPARC processor?

I run IBM 3550M2/3650M2 and SUN X4150,X4170,X4275 -
all in all these are pretty much the same but with more internal drives with
the SUN servers.
on these boxes I'm running ESX VMWARE, Windows (Yes on a SUN box),
Linux-RH5, and Solaris10

In production, I run v490/e2900 SPARC servers, solaris10, and for all my off
processing (where I need speed, I used the IBM3550M2's with 128GB RAM and
either Solaris10 or RH Linux, my main apps are java based.

>From Dave H
===========

What I can tell you is 10 years ago we were mostly a Sun/Solaris shop.  3
years ago we were a majority Dell shop while still maintaining a large
Sun/Solaris Minority.

Today - Sun/Solaris is almost gone.  In some ways it makes me said - because
I have always felt Sun/Solaris was a much more hardened Operating system,
very stable and had great features like D-TRACE - but Solaris is what I
started working with as a SA 10 years ago.

I have 2 examples of performance Increases with X86:

About 4 years ago - we migrated most of our Stand alone Databases from Sun
V490s with Hitachi Storage to some Dell R900s (Xeon) with EMC storage now
running in a cluster type arrangement.  We saw no change in our
transactional times, but our batch times were cut 50-70% - with that change.
 As for OS - we went from Sun Solaris Sparc to Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL)
- which is basically Red Hat Linux.

We have had NO stability issues by changing OS.  New software installations
with new packages is now a breeze compared to our Solaris systems.  No more
compiling all dependencies and Administration and keeping up to date with OS
patches is easy.

Another example of the switch from Sun to Dell Hardware was on our web
systems - we started our web systems on some T2000s, migrated the zones to a
T5140 with the T2+ proc and cut page load times from 10 seconds per page
down to 5 - good improvement.  Last year we rebuild our web systems from the
ground up.  A that time we moved the Database back end from the V490s to the
new DELL systems as well as built the new web-app servers on Dell R710s
(Nehalem) hardware.  The page turns that were 10 seconds are now turning at
sub 2 seconds.

The two biggest issues we had/have with changing Operating systems are:
       OEL has some driver compatibility fun not being true Red Hat - an
good hacker can get around this.
       OEL/Linux is very close to Solaris - but just syntactical different.

We are using Oracle's VM for the Virtualization platform - simply because
the cost is right.

When we were looking at the above moves - our big points were cost,
performance, and reliability.

So far we have not been disappointed.  Shoot - for your 90K - for one server
- you could purchase about 6 big Dell servers.  One last point - last I
checked if you are an Oracle shop - the core to licensing factor for X86 is
.5 where the Sparc processor is .75.
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