Tim Ghriskey, a hedge-fund manager with Solaris Group in New York, says the news spooked him.
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More Oracle databases run on Solaris than on any other operating system, Mr Ellison notes.
They do so because drugs like Solaris actually save the health care system money.
IDC, a market-research firm, warns that customers may decide to use Solaris, but only on non-Sun hardware.
Oracle is moving its Solaris OS to the high-end of the market, leaving an opening for Red Hat.
In the past, Sun sold only proprietary boxes that included its own chips and Solaris, its own operating-system software.
The collapse, a few months ago, of a project to get Solaris running on Intel could hit Sun hard.
But these same people have little appreciation for how difficult and expensive it is to find the next Solaris.
Solaris is similar to Linux, which makes it very easy for customers to switch from one to the other.
Soon Sun will have a handful of different ways to pay for the services it hopes to sell with Solaris.
Sources say the Solaris 8 directory will be a high-performance, general-purpose directory intended to support a range of applications and services.
You also choose your operating system too, like Windows, Linux or Solaris.
The four systems run on Solaris 8 OS and extend the server line whose genesis in September was the Sun Fire 280R.
Its Sparc computer chip and Solaris operating system have been made less relevant by Microsoft Windows, Intel chips and the open-source Linux operating system.
Dell is moving its back-end applications from Sun Solaris systems to Linux, which could be indicative of what other companies are doing to slash their fixed costs.
If you studied computer science at any time in the past 10-15 years, the chances are that you trained on Solaris and then specified Solaris for your company.
The NetDynamics 5 application server will be available on the Solaris operating environment and Windows NT platform by theend of this month, as will the PAC for COM technology.
In explaining his decision to make the acquisition today, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison boiled down Sun into a company of two key assets: Java and the Solaris operating system.
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Although the operating system is a little bulkier, developers will be able to write applications to Solaris and assume that the programs can take advantage of the underlying directory services.
While Linux lacked the kind of support that Sun provides for Solaris, it was never going to make much headway running the applications that companies rely on for their core processes.
"The upstart renegade Apple has now supplanted corporate IBM in profit generation, " said Tim Ghriskey, chief investment officer of Solaris Asset Management in New York, which owns both IBM and Apple shares.
Oracle did not want to let IBM get its hands on Java and Solaris, and felt it had to react to what looks more and more like a thorough restructuring of the computer industry.
In Israel, Solaris Synergy has developed a concentrated photovoltaic technology for a floating farm, which includes an innovative evaporation cooling technology called Aquasun that keeps the silicon elements at a low and stable temperature.
Sun is first releasing a new version of its Solaris operating system designed to integrate flash and traditional disk-drive storage, and in the next six months it plans to sell its own flash storage drives aimed at businesses.
Sun is also working to improve SSD support with its next-gen ZFS file system, which in addition to powering its Solaris OS should be making an appearance in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, at least in the server version.
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The products involved are the already familiar engineered appliances Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Sun ZFS Storage Appliance and the SPARC SuperCluster, an appliance running Solaris 11 on up to 16 SPARC processors with eight cores each.
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Fujitsu, which also sells computers using Sun Microsystems ' (nasdaq: SUNW - news - people ) solaris operating system, is hoping enough companies have ported 32-bit systems to 64 bits so that it can attract more business than HP did initially.
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