Solaris Athena is reaching its end-of-life
As you may remember from past hardware renewal and Athena reqeust-for-proposal letters, as of about four years ago MIT has stopped purchasing and renewing desktop Sun Solaris Athena systems, both in our public student Athena clusters and as workstations provided to the DLCs. This decision was driven by a variety of reasons, which can be summarized as:
- 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 was rapidly becoming prohibitive
- Declining popularity and lack of industry/higher education adoption of Sun Solaris as a desktop operating environment
- Standardizing on a single, Linux-based Athena desktop platform allows MIT to leverage community efforts in software packaging, user interface development, and hardware integration
- The ability to deploy, maintain, and support more machines in our student computing environment with reduced resources
Support for Sun Solaris Athena desktops ends Summer 2009
With year four since this change coming to a close, we want to remind you that this summer marks the end-of-life for the few remaining Sun Solaris Athena systems in our public student cluster environment as well as those Sun Solaris Athena systems deployed to departments, labs, and centers.
Timeline
- Summer 2005: Initial communications about "Solaris sunset" and IS&T stops renewing Sun Solaris Athena workstations except by special request (Is this really true?)
- Summer 2006, 2007, 2008: Renewals of DLC and public student cluster workstations replace Sun Solaris Athena machines with Athena Linux systems
- Summer 2008: Analysis of Solaris-only 3rd-party software packages and possible alternatives
- Spring 2009: Remaining Sun Solaris workstations come up for renewal
- Summer 2009: Remaining Sun Solaris workstations in public student clusters and most DLC Sun Solaris Athena systems are replaced with Athena Linux systems
- Fall 2009: Remaining DLC Sun Solaris Athena systems replaced with Linux Athena systems
- IAP 2010: Athena Sun Solaris dialup systems (athena.dialup.mit.edu, x.dialup.mit.edu) are replaced
- IAP 2010: Sun Solaris Athena systems in 37-318 ("holdout cluster") replaced with Linux Athena systems