Oracle Solaris Reviews

• Its portability is most important. We can move our database from platform to platform.
• The database itself is fast and reliable and secure.

I think it's more industry an standard and, as a result, we're able to have the right people, the right skill sets, to work on our solution.

Right now, we don't have any difficulties.

Based on my experience I'm very satisfied with the solution. Based on the architecture we have, based on the dependedability, we never have downtime or impact of sorts.

I'm pretty happy with it.

I think Oracle is great in support. We have 24/7 support and anytime that we have any technical hardware or software issue, then we can call and get help.

I think right now everyone talks about the cloud. I think we were falling behind. I would say in, perhaps, not 10 years, maybe less, something like five years, we have to follow the trend.

At that time we had Sybase and we had SQL Server, but then we started moving everything to Oracle.

It was pretty straightforward. It depends on the skill set of the people working with it. I think, for us, we have a group of people that have been working on the operation of the system for a long time.

Regarding selecting a vendor, we are public sector, so we need to have a vendor that has been an industry leader for a long period of time. That's so we can have, in the next decade or two, have reliability.

I think I'd follow the majority of the customers and learn what the vendor has been doing, but not only in the past, what they intend to do in the future as well.

I base my rating of nine out of 10 on the technical solution, and the customer relationship, and the technical support.

If our clients use Solaris exclusively on SPARC systems, it is recommended to perform system backups. This precautionary measure ensures the safeguarding of their data and system integrity.

It serves as a foundational platform, particularly in cloud environments, tailored for specific system designs rather than encompassing all aspects of system management.

It stands out for its exceptional stability.

It may not be as widely adopted and lacks abundant resources and tutorials compared to other Linux systems. The challenge arises from the differences in commands and configurations compared to more common systems like Linux.

I have been using it for five years.

It offers high stability capabilities.

It provides good scalability features.

I would rate its customer service and support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

Implementation is completed within a single day. Insert the installation and in a matter of minutes, the initial setup is complete. Following this, there are two steps for configuration, much like the process in Linux systems.

The annual license cost is fair and reasonable.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

I used Oracle Solaris in business. There are customers that need to backup their Oracle Solaris servers. I would help integrate a solution, such as Veeam, which has an agent for Solaris to backup the Solaris operating system.

Oracle Solaris was the preferred operating system for their customers to run their databases on and to get the best performance. It performs well with Oracle applications. Additionally, there are some features inside that are called zones which are Linux containers.

Oracle Solaris is a Unix-based operating system. People used to call it Slowaris because it was very slow. However, they have different CPU architectures. You can use Solaris also on a normal server x86. Additionally, they have their own CPU architecture, which is called Oracle SPARC architecture. I believe before Oracle was using Oracle Linux, they were using Oracle Solaris for their customers who are using Oracle databases. This was because it was more optimized for the hardware built for it. It has good performance for the database only. However, if you take it out of the Oracle applications, it will not do well compared to other operating systems, such as Linux or even Windows can have better performance.

I have been using Oracle Solaris for a couple of months.

I have used Oracle Linux.

You either buy Oracle Solaris to install it on your hardware, or you get the hardware. Most of the people making the right decision would get the hardware with the SPARC-based architecture.

I did the installation of Oracle Solaris in a lab at home. I did some very small tests. It installs similar to a Linux or Unix installation, they all have the same procedure. It was not complex for me but it would be for others without experience.

I did the implementation of the solution.

This solution needs a license to use it.

If you downloaded Oracle databases you could use this solution but there are better solutions, such as Oracle Linux. Linux has proven to be better performance than Solaris in many aspects. If you approach Oracle and ask them, which one you should use Oracle Solaris or Oracle Linux, they would say Oracle Linux.

I rate Oracle Solaris a seven out of ten.

We are using the solution as an operating system for some of our charging systems.

One of the main features of this solution is the ease of use.

I have been using the solution for approximately ten years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of the solution is good and we have approximately 10 users using it.

The technical support was satisfactory.

We used a vendor team to do the implementation of the solution.

There should be an option to install the solution for free and just pay for the support. We purchased an annual license and the price could be better.

We are going to continue using the solution in the future and I recommend it to others.

I rate Oracle Solaris a seven out of ten.

It's stable. It scales.

It’s hard to say where I think Solaris can improve. I feel like Solaris is getting more and more into a niche. The problem Solaris has is, it's fighting against open source. Open source is taking more and more of the market. It's for free. Solaris you have to pay for. I think there is a problem. I feel it's a propriety system; not open to be modified by the community.

We’ve been using it a long time; since Solaris 2.6.

Running tests can cause it to crash. I do quality engineering off Oracle Solaris. We make changes to adapt it to our hardware. Of course, then we need to make sure that those changes don't cause problems. When you have your first implementation, you didn't think about things and you might run into problems; the system can crash or stop.

It's scalable. It's stable. You have service for it. If you have a problem, you call and there will be somebody coming and helping you with it.

I can't live without Solaris, because that’s my job.

Solaris has a big customer base, compared to others; at least that's what I feel. I'm mostly focusing on Linux as its competitor. I see that you have servers there; you can scale much higher than on Linux. Linux is more in the field where you do multiple small systems, and I'm at the end of big-use systems.

Backwards compatibility and stability are the most valuable features.

The product is really good in and of itself. It does need more third-party support and applications.

What needs to be improved is the documentation. That's not an issue with the product per se, but the documentation lacks lots of things. It's very difficult to find related things. They are not referenced. When a document speaks about one topic, it almost never refers to related topics. That's a bad thing. Documentation speaks mostly about how to do things; it does not speak about why to do or not to do, when you have options. That's missing. Sun used to have such documentation. With Oracle, I don't see it.

I have been using for over 20 years.

Everything crashes now and then, but Solaris crashes much less often than other operating systems. I am not even talking about Microsoft; I don't know anything about that. Even among other Unix types, Solaris is probably the most stable.

Evaluating scalability depends on what is meant by that term. You cannot go beyond the server, so whatever you have installed in the server is how far you can scale. However, depending on the application, if you can run your application in parallel on a number of machines, then it's scalable. That's not a feature of Solaris, it's a feature of the application.

Technical support is reasonably good, 6/10. Sun support used to be better, more technical. Oracle support for Solaris is probably more persistent, but you have to go through more stages to get to a high technical level. When the problem requires more than one type of support, the delay might be significant.

Probably more than half of the companies where I worked used Solaris, but not all of them. There were a few companies where I worked that were strictly Linux shops; no Solaris. The ones that did use Solaris chose it because it usually scales better in a vertical way. You can get a lot more performance out of a single machine. However, when applications can be scaled horizontally, it's usually cheaper to scale them on x86, which more or less means Linux, although not always.

I don't know if I would recommend this solution. It depends on what and how they want to implement it. I definitely would not advise against it, but a lot depends on, not only on the applications, but also on the skill set that they have. If they have people who know Linux and no one who knows Solaris, go with Linux. I have seen system administrators who don't even know that Unix types other than Linux exist. So, asking them to do something on a different Unix operating system, be it Solaris or HP-UX or a long list of others, that's useless. They know only Linux.

That's probably more of a limiting factor than the application. I can run almost any application on Solaris or on Linux, although not with the same efficiency; that's a different story. Most of the time, Solaris will outperform Linux, but not always. Linux is more flexible, so if I need to make adjustments, they are typically easier to do on Linux.

However, the main thing when advising other companies what to do is: What kind of skill set do you have? What kind of skill set can you have? It's much easier to find people who at least claim to be Linux system administrators than Solaris. You almost have to be a dinosaur.

The following are the most valuable features to me:

• Solaris zones: Allows for better server utilization. Drives number of physical servers down. Very lean virtualization technology which I generally prefer to others.
• Live upgrade: In Solaris 10, it allowed us to decrease downtime.
• ZFS: Was and is still the best logical volume manager / file system in my opinion. There is still nothing like it production-ready in the Linux world. Favorite features:
  
  • dedup
  • snapshots
  • checksums and self healing

Dtrace is also pretty useful. However, now Oracle Linux has it and also in RedHat Linux, there is “systemtap” which closely mimics dtrace.

It’s pretty much irrelevant right now as we switched to RedHat several years ago. At least in the telecom solutions I work with.

I would probably like to see it open sourced once again, as was situation with Open Solaris.

Right now, I see less and less organizations using Solaris and, at least from my point of view, there is not much active development around it.

I used this solution for eight years.

Deployment was never an issue.

However, Solaris 10 Jump Start and Solaris 11 AI were somewhat harder to use than the analogue PXE boot + kickstart technology used in RedHat.

Stability was never an issue either.

The last time I had to deal with tech support was probably five years ago.

I find that Solaris had a more difficult learning curve compared to Linux. Partly because there was a much wider Linux community, which is still true today.

I wouldn’t call it complex, but definitely when I started to work with Solaris in 2003, I found a few surprises. At that time, I had Linux administration experience.

We implemented it in-house.

As I've mentioned, it’s hard for me to make any recommendations as I have been working with RedHat for a long time now.

The facility to work between database and the equipment. The facility to integrate with other platforms. Our customers use our cloud. They know the importance of Oracle. They have your own datacenter, but slowly, they want to change to the cloud.

Our strategy is to sell the Oracle cloud because it's easy to configure and to increase demand. And most important for us is the security. We have the biggest customers in Colombia, for example, Bank Colombia, Exito Retail, the biggest retailer in Colombia. Davivienda is another big bank in Columbia; Aval Group. All are working with us with Oracle Solaris.

It's slowly come to them. All the customers I named used IBM before. For example, Bank Colombia was on a platform called IBM Power. We sold to them the Solaris platform, the M7 platform, for digital information.

I think Oracle Solaris is stronger than Power in Colombia.

It's good. To me, it's better than other products. For example, Power AIX. I think Solaris better. 

Three years.

It's stable. When we sold the solutions with Solaris, we sold them with premium support. The stability is sometimes is not good. That's the truth. So we sold another component, the TAM (Technical Account Manager) for complete premium support. Oracle TAM helps us to have better support.

It's scalable. For example, when the customer uses Oracle databases, you can migrate to the biggest version easily. This includes migrating from IBM Power to Solaris. I think this is added value for Solaris.

Good. I think it's good.

To me, the perfect vendor provides reliability, that's the big one. And security. That is the other big one.