[vcf-midatlantic] Oracle finally kills off Sun

[David Riley]

> On Sep 12, 2017, at 16:38, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
> 
>> This particular market also had a LOT of money and didn’t quibble about prices as long as they got exactly what they wanted.  Sun also had a very good QA process with lots of traceability which is extremely important for applications that were expected to run for years non-stop.  Sun offered on-site maintenance that could get to any site anywhere in the world on short notice; Oracle is probably still providing that service until all the old switches get powered down.
> 
>  Was this Summa, by chance?  I know the VCO-4K switch uses SPARC
> processors.  I don't know if they changed that after the Cisco
> acquisition.  Cisco is very big on MIPS and PPC for embedded applications.

Telcos, most likely. I had a friend who worked for Verizon in ops; he said the reason they stuck with Sun despite the cheap availability of Linux hardware was the ironclad, no-questions-asked SLAs. If your hardware went down, they paid you money equivalent to the business lost, right away. And they obviously had the service resources available to make that time as short as possible.


- Dave