Oracle Software and Solutions

We use Oracle Solaris to develop and support our VDCF (Virtual Datacenter Cloud Framework) management and monitoring software. Several virtual machines (LDoms and Zones) are used on SPARC and x86 Servers.

We are able to deploy new environments very quickly and securely. Using the virtualization features, we can migrate the environments very flexibly between our servers.

Solaris includes two virtualization solutions: LDoms for SPARC and Solaris Zones. Both solutions can be combined to create private clouds. Solaris Zones is ideal to separate applications and to migrate from older to current hardware. LDoms is very efficient because it uses the hardware hypervisor of the SPARC servers.
Both technologies increase Security, because they separate the applications from each other. Using the Security Compliance Framework we are sure the systems are setup properly

Patching without downtime would be nice.

Update 08/2021: Live Paching of Kernel is now available. We applied IDRs successfully on several servers.

I have been using the solution for more than 14 years now.

We had no issues with the stability.

Solaris is very robust and scalable. No issues so far scaling it.

Oracle offers a good online support portal called "My Oracle Support", which includes a big knowledge base. Because Oracle is a very large organization, it sometimes takes a bit too much time for support requests to reach the right support engineer.

Neutral

Used Solaris 10 before, but Solaris 11 is much easier and faster with patching.
Based on BootEnvironments and ZFS Solaris 11 always offers a failback.

The initial setup is straightforward. Oracle has in-depth admin manuals. To speed up deployments, we implemented our own deployment and management framework VDCF.

We implemented it with our in-house team based on Oracle's best practices documents. With virtualization, we recommend to first define a standard on how to deploy and then to deploy using that standard, avoiding any variation. There are so many options, but our favorite is the fully-virtualized LDom with applications installed into Solaris Zones.

When buying a server from Oracle, all the software is included -- OS, virtualization and patches. There are no hidden costs. We like the long life cycle of Solaris and the SPARC servers. There's no need to replace the hardware every two to three years, and we have a life cycle of five years and more.

Use deployment tools for automation and avoid doing everything manually. Deployment tools help to avoid errors and create a standardized environment.

Web services and environment status by ping service and SOAP & Restful web service request. check on JVM and other transaction monitoring.

This product helps to reach the cause of an outage or unstable system in production and in handling such situations. It provides an easy way to reach the root cause of the problem and to resolve it asap. It helps in CPU utilization monitoring as well as thread and memory management.it helps in building emergency respond team for monitoring team. At some point monitoring team does not need to engage operation team as feature like restart of server can done through this tool.

Max use was server monitoring and operations of applications. This helps handling of critical situations in a production and support for the customers.

Customization for double secure / nonce based / token based Business Transaction Management. Where you can monitor DB calls as well as Web service calls under firewall.

One to four years. 

No

Yes... sometimes it does not trigger an alert in case of an issue. Trying to fix it with custom build changes.

Customer Service:

2 on a scale of 1 to 5 (1=worst , 5=best)

Technical Support:

2 on a scale of 1 to 5 (1=worst, 5=best)

Neutral

We still have t-mart alert system. We switched to this one to monitor systems in detail. T-mart alert is just a replication of a user's behavior which does not show the cause of the issue.

Straightforward with all necessary steps mention in the online documentation.

Together as a one team. 3 on a scale of 5.

License version..does not cost too much due to license and agreement between vendor and company.

No. We use other Oracle products like Java, Weblogic Portal, Weblogic Server, Sun One web servers, Solaris servers and Linux.

If you have a license contract with Oracle and if you have a lifetime agreement on service on any product from Oracle, then this product is worth using. Otherwise, it's best to explore the option of using an open-source product. Not worth it for start-up companies.