have been 'gunshy' to support it because of the history with Sun just dropping the x86 support in the past. The reintroduced Solaris on X86 with Solaris 10, but it seems for the most part 'major' players, like Oracle/Peoplesoft, etc. I think this left alot of companies and developers with a 'bad taste' in their mouth. They had a big presence with Solaris 2.6, then kinda just dropped it. Sun just recently got back into the X86 platform.

I have Sparc processor based workstation I use pretty heavily for support. Mostly on the Sun SPARC platform for business apps, Peoplesoft, Kronos, etc. I've been doing Solaris support for about 7 years. that's entering into religious territory. Chosing Solaris over FreeBSD or Linux, if you're only working with standard PC-hardware. If you've got an investment in a Sun/Solaris infrastructure for your servers, running Solaris on workstations is very attractive. Some jobs work fine with a cluster of cheap boxes, some jobs -really- need an assload of processors on a single system. It's still hard to get an x86 machine with more than 4 CPUs, but all the big-name Unix vendors (Sun, HP, IBM, SGI) offer at least 64-way machines (up to 512 at SGI). Non-PC Unix systems still live on as high-end servers - big database servers, high-volume web-servers, Java application servers and the like. The same OS scales pretty gracefully across their whole lineup & their higher-end machines have some pretty mind-blowing features (if you've never been exposed to enterprise-grade hardware - 'Oh, these 4 CPUs are bad, lets swap them out, while the machine is still running').ġ0 years ago, Sun was one of the big names in Unix workstations - they'd be used for compute-intensive, technical work (CAD/CAM, circuit design, etc) but in recent years, PC-based hardware, running Linux and Windows, has taken over that role in most cirumstances. Historically, it's been primarily targeted at Sun machines - their current line-up has everything from single-processor x86 workstations up to 128-processor SPARC monsters, with a few weird bits in the middle, like the T1000. It's actually derived from 'real Unix' rather than scratch-built so that it looks-like-unix as Linux was (which may or may not mean anything to you). Solaris is Sun's Unix-variant, called SunOS until verson 4-something.

Solaris os