On our production systems, we've been forced to run Solaris since about 2001, when we ditched some old ALR-9000 Gateway servers running NT 4.0 and Domino 4.61d. Sure, I'd have loved to buy a herd of cheap Intel-based boxes and run clusters atop Linux -- in fact, the Sun guy over in our systems division asked me why we hadn't just done that instead of spending over half a million dollars on a pair of full-dress 6503s -- but we were told that Sun is our production platform, that's why.

Over the years, Domino has run adequately on Solaris, though of course the new, hot releases and bug fixes almost always were released for everything but Sun a lot sooner. Our first QuickPlace 1.0 server was on Windows, but when we went to QP 2.08 atop Domino 5.08, it was on top of Solaris.

In recent years, we've had a hell of a time getting QuickPlace to stay running. Mystery problems that only occurred on Solaris that didn't exist on Windows or AIX or Linux or BeOS or AmigaOS or AppleDOS or TRS-DOS or any other damn platform... and it'd be months before IBM could figure things out and patch stuff for us.

Imagine our delight when we were on this conference call and some people from IBM basically said that the 8.0x releases are the end of the line for new releases of Quickr on Solaris. Imagine the glee of our pro-Microsnot systems people when they realized that Sharepoint would finally be able to "replace" QuickPlace/Quickr. Imagine how pissed off I was to hear that IBM claimed they'd announced the end of the road at Lotusphere or thereabouts... and I remember asking several people who ought to have known whether Solaris was going to be supported properly in the future.

Imagine Sun's delight when we tell them that our V2000 blades are going to be the last Quickr servers we ever own.

I went hunting, of course. Looked all over the IBM/Lotus sites, even the unofficial ones, for something, anything, that said specifically that under newly-released-just-last-weekend Quickr 8.1 on Domino, Solaris was not a supported platform. I failed utterly. Even on the 8.1 press releases and documentation/administrator cheat sheets, they refer you to another site for the hardware/software requirements, and the page they refer you to has information for 8.00/8.01, but not actually 8.1. Do we assume that it is supported just because I can't find anything that says it ain't?

Anybody out there know what the deal is?

Yes, yes, I've known for years that Sun is likely going to go the way of NetWare, OS/2, NT on Alpha, and HP/UX as far as support for Domino and its related toys. Yes, I've wondered for years how long Sun can go on selling overpriced, overcomplicated server hardware running a Unix variant that doesn't even do half the cool stuff Ubuntu does. Yes, I've watched as the people we can call at IBM who actually know anything about Solaris get old and gray and die off from boredom.

But no, I cannot find an announcement, let alone anything that gives me any good reason why I shouldn't just hand over my 70,000-seat license for Quickr to the Sharepoint hooligans and say, "here, you figure out what we do with the more than 800 Places we have and the hundreds of gigs of critical data all those execs stored in them."

Once again, IBM is getting out the big hose and shoving it up our Solaris-powered orifices.


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