== What we (probably) want in a future version of Solaris

We're starting to be vaguely in sight of the point at where
we'll have to consider alternatives to [[our current fileservers
ZFSFileserverSetup]]. While the software environment hasn't changed,
our fileserver infrastructure is built on SunFire X2200s and X2100s and
we've already had two hardware failures in our X2100 pool. We have some
number of spare X2200s and of course there's more modern hardware, but
the problem is Solaris licensing; there's a strictly limited pool of
spare X2200s that we can legally use with Solaris.

Oracle Solaris (on new hardware) is not an option. It costs too much
(especially once you include [[likely hardware OurFutureWithSolaris]]
[[costs OracleSolarisFuture]]), we'd have no source code access (which
has been very important to us), and most of all [[I have no trust in
Oracle's long-term behavior OracleDecisionConsequence]]. If we're
building a new fileserver environment that's supposed to last at least
five years, Oracle's handling of Solaris and Solaris licensing issues to
date has created too much uncertainty for me.

The straightforward alternative version of 'Solaris' is one of the
[[Illumos http://www.illumos.org/]]-based distributions. This raises the
question of 'which one', which in turn (for me) raises the question of
just what we want and need in the 'Solaris' that we use.

I'm afraid that my answer is going to be boring: we want a traditional
Unix server OS. We want something with an _/etc/passwd_, _cron_, et al,
something that we log in to through SSH and get a Bourne shell command
line with _vi_ and so on. We're going to continue to configure and
manage ZFS pools our way and with our own tools (and we're going to
continue to use iSCSI in a very specific way); we have no interest in
web management interfaces, integrated NAS systems, and so on. I'd like
to see better package management and more packages in the base system
(it's 2012, everyone should be packaging _rsync_), but if I'm being
honest it's not a very high priority because we're not going to update
these systems unless we can't help it.

We absolutely need source code. Lack of source code almost certainly
would rule an Illumos-derived distribution out of the running entirely.
Among other reasons for source, DTrace is important and [[it's not very
useful without source DTraceTracepointArguments]].

Support is not a priority. Having support nominally available is
reassuring but in practice we've never gotten *actual* support
from Sun and it's all but certain that source code and open source
support channels (IRC, etc) will provide better results.  Similarly,
having the specific release of a distribution updated for a long
time is also reassuring but probably not useful in practice;
we're extremely likely to treat these machines as [[appliances
../sysadmin/PatchingAppliancesSystems]] and never apply updates to them.

(If nothing else, having no official support available will waste
less time because I won't be spending a bunch of time talking to
a support organization that doesn't actually solve my problems.)