Posts by Euneeks

Drop in hardware sales.

So, Oracle tear up the traditional support options and only offer premium support with a platinum support price tag. But that means all dev/uat boxes now have have the support cost of a Plat prod box??

Then the premium SLA's are not as transparent as they were with Sun (a 2 hour engineer to site from the moment Sun picked up the phone and answered is a distant dream) and the chances of you having an onsite Engineer dimished to another pipe dream unless your into coughing seriously high cash for that pleasure. And allowing any other engineer to work on that kit if you centralised your support?

The responses to repeatedly failing systems (which happens to all vendors equipment) is now met with repeat "certification" that a box is clean, to be followed by another failure. Sun would take it offsite while loaning a replacement so the original was diagnosed in a Sun lab, not in the customers server room where it had a function.

And come to the actual support, you could pick up the phone and speak to someone, now you wait for a callback or web response which may come from a suitably knowledgeable engineer or may come from someone who can't comprehend the actual problem & require many levels of frustration while they realise it needs to be escalated.

The original support folks are still there, in a backline function far removed from you unless escalated fairly sharply through account managers who have to jump through flaming hoops to find those few valuable nuggets of knowledge still inside the mothership.

I can ignore hardware costs/features totally. Why would you purchase a Sparc machine unless for M-series high-end /legacy apps (or an Itanium box from HP for that matter) to get such diabolical treatment. Solaris is great & kicks linux but thats only one part.

Comparing the same cost spent buying 2 or 3 x86 machines and vmware'ing/clustering/DR'ing them so you can cope with the poor x86 diagnosability but still achieve the same overall service availability on RHEL/SUSE/x86. Or spend your cash on intelligent storage offerings instead that genuinley assist with DR.

Sun sold slow but reliable kit with good tiered support that justified the cost. Oracle suck out your cash with promise of a feather bed while you actually lay in a bed of thorns.

Just need x86, Linux & dedicated support contracts with each respective vendor (not one combined 'cheap' support offering from an x86 vendor who promises but also can't deliver, ie: HP/IBM)

Fingers crossed for Sybase/SAP to take out some of the monopoly. Maybe they can buy SUSE at some point and complete the software offerings.