• Sparc will have 128 cores by 2015, up from 32 today. It will also have the potential for more than 16,000 computing threads, up from 512 today. Memory capacity will increase from 4TB today to 64TB in 2015.
• Solaris 11 is due out next year, six years after Solaris 10 came out in 2005. It is expected to include improvements in every facet of the operating system, from processor core and thread support to networking and security support.

“With Sparc, we are committing to at least doubling performance levels every two years,” Oracle systems chief John Fowler said. “We will scale to thousands of threads and multiple terabytes of memory.”

All in all, if Oracle follows through on this, that is some impressive stuff. Oracle has been the brunt of some bad news in the wake of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, including poor server sales results and reports that IT shops are leaving the Sun hardware platform. Much of the worry revolving around Oracle-Sun earlier was its virtual nonexistent roadmaps for Sparc and Solaris.

Now that those are in place, Oracle has better ground to be able to retain existing Sun hardware customers, and possibly go out and get some more. We’ll see what happens.

TheInfoPro will release its latest server survey results next month, and the results don’t bode well for Oracle-Sun server hardware. According to the survey of 252 server pros, 21% of Oracle-Sun hardware customers are planning to leave Oracle-Sun for a competitor, with another 26% considering it.

We have documented Oracle-Sun’s hardware woes thus far, and they haven’t been pretty. Though interest in Oracle’s Exadata Version 2 is booming, the fact is that Oracle’s rosy picture of the Sun acquisition isn’t so rosy. For one, Gartner recently reported that Oracle-Sun’s server hardware sales were nosediving.

The results from TheInfoPro also indicate customers’ disenchantment with Oracle software. According to the survey, 18% of end users are considering switching, with the highest cited reasons being poor strategic management, competitive positioning, weakened sales-force quality and low-functioning tech support.

I have spoken to several end users who, despite being big Oracle shops, are still continuing their migration off Sun hardware. Oftentimes they’re moving to commodity x86 hardware on Linux. If that happens to be your case, let us know why you’re doing it, either in the comments or by writing directly to me.