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Solaris Athena Is Reaching Its End of-Life
As you may remember from past hardware renewal and Athena request-for-proposal letters, about About four years ago MIT stopped purchasing and renewing desktop Sun Solaris Athena systems, both in public student Athena clusters and as workstations provided to the DLCs. This decision was driven by a variety of reasons:
- Linux Athena workstations increasingly deliver superior performance at a much lower cost
- Vendors increasingly target Linux as their primary Unix-based desktop platform for both commercial and open-source third-party software and support
- The high cost of developing a custom Solaris distribution with diminishing resources became prohibitive
- As a desktop operating environment, Sun Solaris has suffered from declining popularity and lack of industry/higher education adoption
- Standardizing on a single, Linux-based Athena desktop platform lets MIT leverage community efforts in software packaging, user interface development, and hardware integration
- IS&T can deploy, maintain, and support more machines in MIT's student computing environment with reduced resources
Info title Support for Sun Solaris Athena Desktops Ends Summer 2009 With year four since this change coming At the four year life cycle comes to a close, IS&T wants to remind you that this summer marks the end of life for the few remaining Sun Solaris Athena systems in the public student cluster environment as well as those Sun Solaris Athena systems deployed to departments, labs, and centers.
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Students are also eligible to purchase Acrobat Professional at a discount. For more information on the discount program, go to http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/x/EjJB.
Risks
- Unknown course/class dependencies on Solaris by software in local course lockers for courses/classes
- Unknown dependencies on Solaris by software in local lockers and for departmentally developed applications used by students
- The need to switch over to and learn the Ubuntu-based Linux Athena operating environment
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