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I used SunOS from 1992 and Solaris up to around 2004. I'm in the semiconductor industry and we used to have thousands of SPARCstations and SPARC servers for la

I used SunOS from 1992 and Solaris up to around 2004. I'm in the semiconductor industry and we used to have thousands of SPARCstations and SPARC servers for larger jobs. All of the EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools ran on Unix / X11. Around 2002 the vendors started porting some of the tools to Linux / x86. The machines were faster AND cheaper. By 2003 the only jobs run on the Suns were processes that required >4GB RAM. When AMD released their 64-bit x86 Athlon CPUs we bought some of the first ones. After that the Suns just faded away. In the 1990's all of our file servers were from Auspex. We have been using NetApp fileservers for about the last 20 years. Other than a few scratch drives I don't think we ever used Solaris as a file server.

failwhaleshark 5y ago
An energy-sector engineering shop had SPARCstation 2's and 4's used for running nuclear reactor Fortran compilations and simulations. The software ran on any UNIX (SCO, HP-UX, BSD, SunOS/Solaris, SGI, AIX) and I helped port it to Windows about 1997. Oddly enough, Windows of that era had extremely inefficient virtual memory swap strategies. The university I worked at had a large Solaris deployment for internal IT systems for the CS department. They kept it for many years because it worked, it was a known quantity, and was reliable. They could've changed it over to commodity boxes running Linux or FreeBSD sooner, but that would've been a major headache for downtime, costs, and staff processes. A friend-of-a-friend ran an extremely large deployment of Solaris boxes for batch jobs of a military data processing facility. The scariest SunOS feature was metadisks: striped drive volumes to expand storage.