Nope, Sun HW is Oracle HW

I would not be to surprised if OEL is dropped sometime in a not to far future, but on the other hand that would be true for their x64 HW as well

I'm seeing Solaris becoming a FW in Oracles appliances model going forward, the market for Oracle customers running Oracle on other HW/OS platforms is fairly large and it's the easiest market to address for them.....

A few comments.

Oracle isn't ignoring Solaris for Linux, they are actually putting a fair amount of resources behind Solaris, the issue is licensing cost for non Oracle HW and maybe even more the way the treated the budding OpenSolaris community early on, when they closed the doors on Solaris.

One more thing is kinda where they are focusing their efforts, rather than going after new developers, the focus is on Oracle on Oracle. So even if Oracle are investing in Solaris, they are primarily doing so to run the Oracle stack.

If you "admined Solaris for a few years" a few years back, you should take Solaris 11 for a spin, it's surprisingly fresh and the CLI env can either be configured to use GNU tols like most Linux dists does or old school "Solaris", You might like it.

Dhu, The main usage of Java is on the server side, where it's fairly popular. Java skils is still the most sought after skill when it comes to developers. There are a few popular desktop applications written in Java, Minecraft comes to mind :) And of course we have the slightly modified version of Java that powers every Android application. So Java is still around and kicking..... As to the big Reds handling of Java, out of the gate it was pretty bad in it's interactions with the Java community. Not surprising as they axed most of the folks that where doing that part back at Sun...... But they actually got better with interacting with the Java community lately, could improve more but still kinda on the right track.

As long as you don't mind to get a bit wet, the Thai new year is by far the most entertaining new year celebration.....

Why keep the RAID controller at all, it's likely the slowest CPU you have in your system anyway. SSDs and smart SW based RAID aware filesystems allows build a new type of storage HW, with no need of a dedicated RADID controller. You can already today with OpenSolaris and combination of SATA drives and a few SSDs build storage solution with very good performance. And if you need the pure SSDs IOPs and low access time, just replace your spinning drives with SSDs for even better performance. Your host CPU/CPUs will have a lot better chance of keeping up with your SSD based RAID.

If you want to go real fast http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/f5100/ OK, not something that you would use in home setting, but it shows that there is still lot of room for innovation in the SSD space. But to your point, rather than using traditional SSDs Sun created a "SO-DIM" with flash that allows for higher packing density as well better performance. Info on the flash modules. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/sss/flash_modules/index.xml

Bangalore > lots of cheep labor for simple tasks (Simple x86 core) -> code name makes perfect sense

OpenSolaris comes to mind, Sun have a long history of building systems with > 48 cores that scales well. A UltraSparc T2 based T5440 would give you 256 HW threads to play with.

I disagree with you that it would be in Oracles best interest to dilute or kill of MySQL, I would rather see it as being in their interest to keep MySQL alive a thriving. If you look at it, they could use MySQL to compete with SQLserver on the low to midrange, and use the current Oracle DB server to compete with DB2 on midrange to hi end. But I guess that we have to wait and see what they end up doing.

Think you are missing one important point, yes the world is moving to smaller systems. But if you have a look at a four socket system with 8 core CPUs in there and add hyperthreading, you end up with a system that to the OS and the application looks like a 64way smp with a bit of numa. And lets see, that looks very much like a "large scalable" system, say 5 years a go. So the hw is getting smaller and cheaper, which allows us to build cheep "large scalable" systems, but as nice as it sounds now you will need an OS that can handle all of those CPUs, and lets see Oracle gets a OS that's been thriving on those types of systems for the last 10+ years, namely Solaris/OpenSolaris. I do believe that Sun would have done much better if they would have stuck with what they do best, build HW and write infrastructure SW to make that HW shine, rather than trying to become a SW company, of which they have shown a number of times they don't have a clue.... That is selling SW, they do write very good SW

Netbeans have a built in Chat function that allows you to share code between developers, it might do the trick.