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There is good news though. One of Sun's latest releases - Update 3 - has only a handful of patches. Excellent! One can assume Sun has fixed many of the issues that have plagued earlier releases. Solaris 10's zones and containers look to be great features where system admins can leverage virtualization to consolidate and manage their Solaris applications. ZFS, from what we've seen, is expected to revolutionize the data center in much the same way as Java and Open Office. Hypervisors aren't just for small Windows development systems anymore! Now, if you agree Sun has improved the product in their Update 3 release, what are the drivers for use in the enterprise? To me, it comes down to price/performance, TCO and manageability. First, it starts with the chip. AMD and Intel chips have leapfrogged SPARC processors with regard to performance, power consumption and cooling requirements. Feel free to check out Spec.org for more information. It makes sense that SPARC would lag behind as there isn't much in their space and the company has had a few bad years. AMD and Intel are in a war, which is great for consumers. Did I mention the new virtualization technologies that AMD and Intel are introducing? Further, they're both reducing the size of their chips, allowing for Dual Core and Quad Core blades to be presented to clients in a 1U footprint. Second, AMD- and Intel-based computing platforms provide better TCO than SPARC-based servers. Many would argue that what you save in TCO with x86, you lose in resiliency and fault tolerance against SPARC. This is no longer the case. Check out some of our case studies highlighting major enterprises running their most mission critical, highly-available applications on these AMD- or Intel-based systems. Third, SPARC server platforms have become harder and harder to manage. Maintenance costs on older Sun servers are skyrocketing, and many customers are afraid to go through the forklift upgrade required to move to newer, less proprietary systems. For any forward thinking enterprise, it would be best to get on stateless AMD or Intel-based blades ASAP and leverage the plug and play upgrades when newer chips come out. Solaris 10 x86 U3 works. It's a good option for IT managers, admins and executives. There are platforms to run Solaris 10 out there based on x86 or x64 technologies that are better than SPARC. The real question is, "why not move to Linux?" I'll get back to you on that one after the dust settles. Good luck!