Solaris, Oracle’s Unix-based operating system, has almost reached EOL, but is still used by businesses for one very apt reason – business continuity. Being stable with little downtime, highly robust and scalable, and deeply integrated in enterprise computing systems, they provide a secure environment for workloads, making any changes a costly, effort-intensive affair.
Any CTO knows that Solaris engineering and knowledge are both rare now. Sales have dropped, and most people have moved to alternate options. Those still working with SPARC are the only ones who remain. Solaris migration is needed soon, but until that happens, preventing downtime should be your priority.
What Happens During a Solaris Downtime
Any system facing downtime experiences great loss. With Solaris, that gets them frequently, the loss is doubled. You meet:
- Technical difficulties that have to be resolved by internal or external staff within an acceptable time frame
- Financial loss due to the business remaining halted for an indefinite period that you cannot specify to customers
- Employee time and effort wasted, especially technical staff who have to diagnose the issue and correct it
- Customers being displeased with you and stopping their association with your company due to their loss
Such losses must be recompensed somehow for your company to stay active.
How Can Solaris Tech Staff Ensure Reduced Business Downtime
While business downtime is a rare occurrence, it is not so for technical employees overseeing Solaris. More time goes into fixing machinery after frequent downtimes than managing actual Solaris workloads. However, taking note of their stability and resilience, here’s how you can minimize them:
Ensure Regular Backup
Backing up your system is natural; backing it up regularly is what’s necessary in this era, especially for Solaris. While continuously backing up seems troubling, it is needed for a legacy system. Constant backups ameliorate data losses by keeping them as less as possible.
Maintain Systems
Frequent maintenance may seem useless for the Solaris OS as well as the SPARC server, but it is necessary to ensure upkeep at all times. They will only work well if the legacy infrastructure that runs to keep your necessary applications operational remains functional.
Optimize Frequently
Seamless connectivity is a necessary component for the systems to work soundly, and that can be done only with optimization. While updates are frozen, security patches still come. By using them on time, every time, you can ensure that the OS works as intended.
Employ Cybersecurity
Do not think that your Solaris operating system, or even SPARC processor, is entirely safe. Some malicious actor might be looking at your system, or your own employee might be doing something unwittingly, and it causes an attack. It is better to be very safe than overly sorry.
Be Compliance-Ready
You may think that a nearly aging OS does not need strict compliance, but you are wrong. As a CTO, you must understand that always enforcing these standards is not just important; it is absolutely necessary. Keeping up with them will ultimately help you rather than hinder.
Enforce Disaster Recovery
DR being top-of-the-line for a legacy system might seem like a waste of time, but understand that war, especially with current geopolitical tensions, outage and failure, natural disasters, cyberattacks, epidemics, or even human error, can happen at any moment.
Utilize Emulation
The best possible way to prevent downtime and the corresponding losses is to go for emulation. The Lift-and-Shift approach replicates your entire system, Solaris OS and applications, and plants them in a modern hardware setting without changing any part.
An example of the above is Stromasys. It uses its Linux SPARC emulator, called Charon-SSP, to recreate Solaris and any applications operating on it, ditto as the original, on an x86-64 platform. It operates as before, thinking it still works on the SPARC hardware. You can even implement Charon on the cloud if you want added benefits.
Final Takeaway
As a CTO, having a working operating system should be your priority, even with an aging one like Solaris. If anything, you should be more careful; old systems almost on the brink of falling off are more likely to have issues you are not used to. The onus is still on you to maintain and protect it.
The right practices and useful products can help you if you utilize them correctly. Sure, Solaris systems are about to be outdated, and you are pretty much done with them. However, it is optimum to maintain it until total obsolescence and prevent unwanted downtime from harming business continuity, the system, as well as you and the technical team.