[Gllug] Solaris training

[Jose Luis Martinez]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 7:03 AM, Matthew Smith <indigojo at blogistan.co.uk> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I just got a call from the Sun Microsystems training people, telling me
> I might be eligible for partially government-sponsored training in
> Solaris administration.  Sun do a two-part Solaris admin course and the
> government's "Train to Gain" scheme covers 60% of the costs.
>
> Has anyone got any experience of Sun training?

Yes, I do. The training is of very high standards, the guys training
you are normally very knowledgeable,  with very good understanding of
the internals of the technologies they teach you.

> The woman who called
> couldn't tell me how much the cost would be, with or without the discount.

That is unforgivable frankly, nevertheless it takes just a couple of
minutes to find out this information in Sun's website (www.sun.co.uk,
no, I don't work for them :-) ). A full set of courses and exams to
obtain certification as a  Solaris 10 System Administrator should
fetch you around 4000 quid, so if what that lady told you is correct
you would be paying 1600, a real bargain if you ask me.

Of course you could try the self taught  route  (there are excellent
books out there that prepare you for the exams) and then just buy the
exams (2 in total for Solaris 10 SA certification), that would be
around 400 quid (would be interesting to know if you would get the
discount for those only, in which case you could be fully certified
after spending less than 200 quid!).

>
> Also, how much in demand are Solaris admin skills nowadays?

Quite a bit, but newcomers may struggle: the industries that
traditionally require Solaris types (banking, oil, education,
research) are cutting drastically head count, outsourcing or moving
what is possible to Linux, only to find the hard way that they need
the old timers to keep things going and that Linux may not be suitable
for some situations, at that point they look for safe pairs of hands
in the industry.

>  I know that
> Solaris has been losing out to Linux all over the place, so how
> transferable are Solaris skills to Linux really?

I would say very transferable, at the end the ideas behind Linux share
a long tradition with the Solaris ways, in recent years Solaris
started adopting the same utilities you find in Linux, even the GNOME
desktop.

> What about the Oracle
> acquisition?  I asked about this on the phone and she told me that all
> the training schemes were going ahead, but the problem is that they're
> not much use if the OS is going downhill anyway.

The OS is not going downhill at all. Solaris 10 is maybe the biggest
innovation from Sun since they moved SunOS from BSD to System V,  the
fact that it runs in Intel, is commercially supported, has a wide base
in big companies and has some degree of openness  ensure IMHO that it
will be with us for many years to come.

If you have not seen the storage appliances Sun is pushing (based
around Solaris 10's ZFS and dtrace) you should really have a look at
them. You could not do such versatile  thing with Linux or any other
OS for that matter.

>
> Regards,
>
> Matt Smith
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