What will happen with ZFS now Solaris is gone?

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Tim

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Nov 7, 2012
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"For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product."​
(from twitter a few days ago, sorry if this is old news)
Source: Simon Phipps on Twitter
And Oracle Finally Killed Sun

My main concern is what will happen with ZFS?
Will Solaris go "openSolaris" with "openZFS" or something?
I don't know who holds any rights when Oracle just terminates these things.

I know Solaris 12 disappeared earlier this year from the roadmap but this was a bit shocking still.
 

Linda Kateley

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Apr 25, 2017
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IMHO I think zfs and all other solaris goodies will live on in the open. Especially now with oracle not being a roadblock. The thing about it too.. is that solaris isn't just going to die.. Geesh people still run things like DOS.
 

cactus

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Jan 25, 2011
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IMHO I think zfs and all other solaris goodies will live on in the open. Especially now with oracle not being a roadblock. The thing about it too.. is that solaris isn't just going to die.. Geesh people still run things like DOS.
What makes you think Oracle is now not a road block? Copywrite on the source is still in Sun, thus Oracle's name.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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May be good for ZFS, it can really evolve and not have that concern about comparability to the SUN version, the only zpool versions will be the open source ones in the end.
 

cheezehead

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Sep 23, 2012
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OpenZFS will live on. Solaris forked as illumos awhile ago and I suspect it will continue on. The closed source version of Solaris likely be abandoned once un-patched vulnerabilities run rampant on the OS.
 

i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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IMHO I think zfs and all other solaris goodies will live on in the open. Especially now with oracle not being a roadblock. The thing about it too.. is that solaris isn't just going to die.. Geesh people still run things like DOS.
I don't think so. Oracle has SLAs till 2034/35, it's very unlikely that they will release their ip as free/open source software untill then.
May be good for ZFS, it can really evolve and not have that concern about comparability to the SUN version, the only zpool versions will be the open source ones in the end.
Oracles zfs has newer deduplication, resilvering & some other technologies (aquired from other companies) that make it faster & less memory hungry than Openzfs.
If solaris would be free (like free beer) I would take it over linux/bsd/solaris clones with openzfs.
 

dragonme

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Apr 12, 2016
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Huh... and someone called me crazy for saying solaris was dead a couple weeks ago....
 

wildchild

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Feb 4, 2014
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Zfs has been open since oracle kidnapped sun.
A small, but increasing number of company's are very actively develloping on it, and while omniti stopped, a few very dedicated company's pitched in and took over, and have been very active.
Openindiana has also been actively develloped, which is the direct descendant of opensolaris.

Opensolaris was opensourced right before oracle could get it's nasty claws in it, so totally non dependant to oracle
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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At the moment I would call Oracle Solaris ZFS the superiour ZFS platform over OpenZFS regarding performance and features mainly ZFS filesystem encryption, multiple shares of a ZFS filesystem with different rules like rw/ro or source ip and sequential resilvering. Due the long support range until 2034 we will see Solaris at least for that time. Oracle will keep for sure enough engineers to fulfill their SLA agreements but I doubt that they can keep the advance with limited staff and a negative outlook to the future. Some advantages like sequential resilvering or encryption are on the way to Open-ZFS, some like SMB3 are already in Nexentastor5, a commercial Illumos distribution. I hope someone, propably Nexenta staff itself like with SMB 2.1 will upstream this to the common OpenSource Solaris fork Illumos.

So I have no worry about the continuation of Solaris with its Opensource fork. I do have Oracle Solaris users mainly from the .gov or .edu area but I suppose 99% of my napp-it users are using OpenSource storage mainly with OmniOS and OI, distributions of the Opensource Solaris fork. I am really glad that it was possible for Illumos to fork OpenSolaris 7 years ago. Many ZFS or Solaris developpers from SUN went to Illumos companies when Oracle took over SUN and I would expect more to land there now so my expectation is that Illumos with distributions like NexentaStor, OI, OmniOS or SmartOS among others can become the real Solaris as an OpenSource OS.
 
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gea

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Update
Up to the cloud (In German: Alles geklaut)

Solaris' update plan is real, but its future looks cloudy by design

and
Session Catalog | Oracle OpenWorld 2017

Best Practices for Keeping Your Oracle Solaris Workloads Secure
Monday, Oct 02, 2:15 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. | Marriott Marquis (Yerba Buena Level) - Salon 13
Join us in this session to learn all you need to know about keeping your Oracle Solaris systems secure, on-premises and in the public cloud. Hear about the new changes to the Oracle Solaris release model to provide continuous delivery of new features, functionality, and security fixes, and learn how you can best take advantage of the streamlined lifecycle management technologies to ensure that you never have to have awkward conversations with your boss on why your systems have been compromised.

IT Infrastructure: Oracle Solaris
Session Type: Conference Session

SPEAKERS
Darren Moffat, Oracle
 

Linda Kateley

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Apr 25, 2017
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My point earlier is that there is way too much investment in zfs. Oracle is not the kind of company to sue or force IP over tiny communities. I do wonder whats happening at WD now. If someone grows big enough to be "shiny" i think then oracle will try to stop them. Think of the big companies invested now.. netgear, wd, samsung, intel, IBM all have some investment in zfs. If they were going to bring in the lawyers they would have shut down IBM or canonical.

Like earlier in this thread, if oracle was going to get lawyers involved, they would have done it already. The one platform that make a ton of money for them is the ZFS appliance. Although solaris eng might be dead, doesn't mean the zfs platform is. If i had a crystal ball I would see them thinking what I have thought for years.. Why would I pay some little company 100's a TB when I can get solaris support per core. The business model doesn't make sense, even for the zfs appliance. Solaris per core support is multi X cheaper. Run on commodity hardware and you can have petabytes at singles thousands for support costs for global support.
 

gea

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Dec 31, 2010
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The new Oracle business concept around Sparc and Solaris ??

- cancel Solaris as a general use server OS sold to customers
- cancel Sparc/ Storage hardware as a general offer sold to customers

This will allow to set free thousands of engineers/ managers/ sales staff

- offer Storage and Solaris services/ cluster/ zones as a cloud offer only,
similar to the SmartOS concept ?

This will reduce supported Solaris services to a few, customers and hardware to one (Oracle itself). With a few engineers you can handle this offer.

You pay per availablity, storage and performance/CPU, no own hardware and staff needed

If you trust Oracle (and for European users the US NSA/ homeland security) and if you have the needed network performance this may even increase availabilty and reduce costs but you give up the internal know how to run yourself.

??
 
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Linda Kateley

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All of this is just my opinion, but ..

I will say that most of the solaris or zfs sales or support people I know appear to be still there today. I also watch solaris jobs openings and a bunch of support jobs were posted recently.

Just from the short time I was at oracle, they like to make people think they are amazing. I can see them easily reducing the general purpose solaris only to bundle it only into an "engineered system". It is and has been their stated goal and plan since the first day of aquiring sun.. They hate things like people running db2 on solaris.

As far as internal skills.. Everything is going to the cloud. I have old solaris customers that I recommend joyent all the time.
 

Klee

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Jun 2, 2016
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SunOS on a Spark Ultra 5..........my mid to late 90's workstation/server.....................mmmmmmmm.

So far ahead in performance compared to Windows NT 3.51 or NT 4 pc's it was silly.

Had up-time counted in years.

Only crapped out once, one of the SCSI cd drives crapped out one weekend and the hard drive filled up with log files and the workstation choked and all I had to do was unplug the bad cd drive and the delete the logs to gain back the space and was up and running in minutes.

It had a separate tower with two SCSI cd drives in it and only needed one so I rolled with the second one until it was replaced by a Windows 2000 server.

Always been a big Sun fan.




Last versions I received and used:
 
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whitey

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I wish I would have kept my Ultra 2 workstation (kicking myself), that pig w/ dual 400Mhz procs and 2 GB of memory was the 'tits of the town' back then. Had a SUN Enterprise 4500 as well in the lab, good/nostalgic times for sure.

Had insane uptimes as well typically measured in years.
 

Linda Kateley

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Apr 25, 2017
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All of this is just my opinion, but ..

I will say that most of the solaris or zfs sales or support people I know appear to be still there today. I also watch solaris jobs openings and a bunch of support jobs were posted recently.

Just from the short time I was at oracle, they like to make people think they are amazing. I can see them easily reducing the general purpose solaris only to bundle it only into an "engineered system". It is and has been their stated goal and plan since the first day of aquiring sun.. They hate things like people running db2 on solaris.

As far as internal skills.. Everything is going to the cloud. I have old solaris customers that I recommend joyent all the time.
Oops I was wrong with this.. A ton of people were laid off in June.
 

BLinux

cat lover server enthusiast
Jul 7, 2016
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a lot of old timers like me here... i still have an Ultra 2 w/ dual 400Mhz UltraSPARC-II and 2GB of RAM along with a D1000 disk array. also have an Ultra 5 that I overclocked. sold most of my old sun gear though.. those are the last and will probably throw them on ebay for someone else who might want to play with old stuff... the D1000 +U2 server would probably make for a good ZFS playground.