Forum Feature requests

Solaris for Prince 12.5

n_edwards
Is it possible to get a build of Prince 12.5 for Solaris 11 (64-bit)?

Thanks!
mikeday
On intel?
DarinM
No.. SPARC is needed.
georgeb
I work with n_edwards. We have evaluated Prince using a Windows version of the tool and are happy with the results.However, we need a build for a Sparc machine. Assuming you can provide a build, do you expect we will have trouble upgrading in the future? Our customer is considering purchasing this software. I do not want to suggest the tool if you do not expect to be able to support Solaris/Sparc in the future.

Thanks for the suport.
mikeday
We will need a suitable Sparc hosting solution similar to IBM's development cloud which allows us to support their Power architecture. We will investigate and get back to you.
mikeday
Unfortunately Oracle do not appear to make this very easy, so investigations are continuing; it may take another two months.
georgeb
Thanks for your efforts. Have you made any progress?
mikeday
Sadly no. Although Oracle suggest that they have Sparc hardware available through their compute cloud they continue to ignore our support requests, promise to call back but do not actually do so, and the only hardware they provide us with is all Intel-based. It's not clear if this is just incompetence on their part or a deliberate attempt to discourage people from supporting Sparc (a platform they plan to drop in the future?) even if we are willing to pay them for the privilege of doing so.

Since the manufacturer isn't willing to support their own product it makes it very difficult for us to do so, and thus we would recommend using an Intel or AMD server instead, since these are available from a wide range of supportive vendors at competitive prices and deliver excellent performance. You can even acquire them from Oracle.

But if you are tied to Sparc hardware and cannot use anything else in your data center then perhaps you could ask Oracle how vendors are supposed to develop applications for it, because they are not willing to tell us.
mikeday
(A good comparison is AIX on the Power architecture, which is not our preferred platform but thanks to the supportive approach taken by IBM it only takes us a couple of days to build and test Prince ready for deployment).