Long support cycles

The support cycle

Enterprise customers want to protect their investments. They don’t want to use an operating system only to be forced in two years to use a different one, because they won’t get any support. Most companies have a really long process of validating new configurations and they don’t want to go through it without a good reason (bigger hardware updates or when they use a new software). Thus you have to support a commercial unix quite long.

Out of this reason, Sun has an well defined and long life cycle for the releases of our operating environment.

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::: center
::: {#default}
=.25[Event]{.smallcaps} =.5[Name]{.smallcaps} [Description]{.smallcaps}
————————- ———————– ————————————————————————————————————————————-
=.25E1 =.5
=.25E2 =.5 Okay, one year before we announce the formal End of Life of the product, Sun sends the first notification/warning to our customers.
=.25E3 =.5
=.25E4 =.5
=.25E5 =.5
=.25E6 =.5
=.25E7 =.5
=.25after E7 =.5: Events in the lifecycle of a Solaris release ::: :::

[]{#default label=”default”}

This is the policy of Sun for lifecycles. We won’t shorten the time, but often the effective lifetime is much longer, as you will see in the next paragraph.

An example: Solaris 8

Okay, we started to ship Solaris 8 in February 2000.Last order date (E4) was at November 16, 2006. After that we shipped Solaris 8 Media Kits until February 16, 2007. Solaris 8 entered Retirement support mode Phase I on Mach 31, 2007. Thus it will reach Retirement Support Mode Phase II on March 31, 2009. End of Service Life is on March 31, 2012. Thus Solaris 8 has an service life of 12 years.

Sidenote

For a customer this long release cycles are optimal, but there is a problem for Sun in it. We don’t force our customer to use new versions early. Some customers still use old Solaris 8 versions and they use Solaris 10 like Solaris 8 to keep the processes in sync. There are some technological leaps between 8 and 10, but they don’t use the new features. They think they know Solaris, but they know just 8, not 10. The reputation of being somewhat outdated has its root partly in this habit. This is the bad side of the medal, but long support cycles are too important to change this policy...

Do you want to learn more

Disclaimer: The following documents are the authoritative source. If I made a mistake at summarizing them, the informations in these both documents are the valid ones.

Solaris Operating System Life Cycle

Solaris Operating System Retirement End Of Life Matrix