Oracle has filed a notice under California's Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) regulations that reveals it has recently made 1,008 permanent layoffs in its Santa Clara and San Diego facilities.

The WARN notice (PDF) says the 964 Santa Clara sackings were made on September 1st, the day before the Labour Day long weekend, and will take effect on October 31st. Big Red's Santa Clara offices were previously occupied by Sun Microsystems, a factoid that lends credence to reports on social media and sites like The Layoff alleging extensive cuts to hardware and Solaris teams.

Since making the layoffs, Oracle has released a new product roadmap on which the new version of Solaris, Solaris.next, has been pushed into 2018 instead of the previously-planned release date of later in 2017. That slower release schedule suggests Big Red has either hit speed bumps in its attempts to develop the OS, or now lacks the head count to hit previous deadlines.

But Oracle does seem to have a future planned for Solaris, perhaps emulated in the cloud, as talks listed in the content catalog for Oracle OpenWorld include sessions like “Lift and Shift Your Oracle Solaris Workloads to the Oracle Cloud” and “Virtual SPARC on x86: Your Legacy Solaris Apps Survive on an x86 SPARC Emulator”. The latter will be delivered by a third-party vendor named Stromasys, so does not appear to represent Oracle's own plans for Solaris' future. ®