We ‘engineered’ – as in wrote the required internal docs – for Solaris x86 a few years back. We found no internal users wanting it. If their s/w was ported to x86 it was to Windows or Linux, not Solaris. We
dropped support.
BUT I read on this group of people who converted their RHEL media servers to Solaris x86 just to use ZFS and got a big performance boost compared to staging to EXT3.
So it does depend on what you need. What I would say since Ora¢le took over is to check carefully the ¢ost. It is emphatically not the same as Sun according to others on the Sun Managers group. Another aspect
is your in-house knowledge; we have a number of staff with many years Solaris knowledge and a few staff with a few years RHEL knowledge; that delta has a cost.
You have to weigh these up. I would also be interested to see what others on this forum who are Sun SPARC users think about the future.