Sun sees OpenSparc gaining traction
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Sun is offering its UltraSparc T1 processor, Niagara, to the market through its OpenSparc program, in which specifications of the microprocessor are shared in an open-source community with hardware and software developers.
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SANTA CLARA, CALIF. â Enterprises that in the past may have been leery of open source alternatives to commercial software have opened up to the concept, panelists said here Tuesday at an SDForum conference entitled "Open Source â Entering the Mainstream.âADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
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SAN JOSE, Calif.--When Sun Microsystems releases Solaris as open-source software, it plans to provide legal protection from patent-infringement suits to outsiders using or developing the operating system--one of several ways Sun hopes to make Solaris more
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InfoWorld - The key to Sun&#39;s success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday.
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InfoWorld - Sun described on Wednesday a growth strategy that depends in large part on giving away software in the hope that customers will like it enough to sign up for support contracts and perhaps buy Sun hardware on which to run it.
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Company plans to begin shipping in February its Open Enterprise Server, which combines open source and commercial networking platforms.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun MicrosystemsÂ on Wednesday will begin donating its Solaris clustering code to the open-source community, the latest move in the company'sÂ ongoing strategyÂ to eventually make all of its software freely available. It has been more than two years since SunÂ released OpenSolaris, an open-source version of its Solaris 10 Unix operating system. Since June 2005, the vendor has made other pieces of its software freely available, notably itsÂ core Java platformÂ starting in November of last year. Sun hopes opening up its software will enable its products to enter new markets and lead to more customers for its servers, storage, and paid support services. Known as Open High Availability Cluster, Sun will release its Solaris Cluster source code over the next 18 months through the High Availability (HA) Clusters community on the OpenSolaris Web site. Developers can use the code to help them build clustered and high-availability applications and services. Sun will make the clustering source code available under its own open-source license, CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), said Paul Steeves, director of Solaris marketing at Sun. There are no plans to also provide the code under the GNU general public license (GPL)Â as Sun did with Java. That situation might change, if, as rumored, Sun decides to also provideÂ OpenSolaris under GPLv3. The third version of the GPL is due to be finalized later this week. OpenSolaris is currently offered under CDDL. Sun will make three major contributions to the clustering code, according to Steeves. The first donation, due out this week, is focused on application modules or agents that allow open-source or commercial applications to become highly available in a clustered environment. Sun will make the code available for 24 of the high-availability agents it offers with its commercially available Solaris Cluster software. Among the agents are modules for Sun's Solaris Containers virtualization technology, BEA Systems' WebLogic application server and the open-source PostgreSQL database. "There are a couple of agents we need to work through, that have encumbrances," Steeves said, where Sun doesn't hold enough rights to release the code under CDDL. These modules include agents for Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology, Sybase's database and IBM's WebSphere middleware. "We intend to release them once we've worked through the licensing," he added. Sun will also provide documentation for the agents along with the source code for the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) so that developers can test new agents they develop, Steeves said. Agents written using Open HA Cluster will run on Cluster Express, a binary version of Solaris Cluster, which Sun plans to release in a few weeks, Steeves said. The agents will also run on the latest version of Sun's commercial clustering product, Solaris Cluster 3.2, which debuted in January, and runs on the Solaris 9 and 10 operating systems. The second donation will likely appear in December, Steeves said, and will include code for the Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, software that enables multisite disaster recovery. At the end of the 18-month period, Sun will release the code for the core Solaris Cluster infrastructure along with more documentation and additional SCATE infrastructure tests. In total, Sun will make around 2 million lines of clustering source code available, Steeves said. By comparison, Sun's donation of Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software to the open-source community represents over 6 million lines of code. Â
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InfoWorld - Sun is expected Tuesday to ship xVM Ops Center, a datacenter automation console compatible with Linux- and Solaris-based x86 and Sparc environments.
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Enterprises are opening up to open source alternatives to commercial software, panelists said at the SDForum conference âOpen Source Entering the Mainstream,â held in Santa Clara, Calif., last week.
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Architecturally, Sun's approach is close in concept to VMware's hardware-level virtualization system, which centers around the ESX Server hypervisor.
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Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.The support, which starts at $20 per user per year, will be offered to companies that distribute OpenOffice.org, not directly to end-users, according to Mark Herring, senior director of marketing for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Network.com. &quot;For a lot of distributors, they wanted to distribute OpenOffice.org and had no option for back-line support,&quot; he said.OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Sun&#39;s accompanying commercial product, are compatible with Microsoft Office and identical in terms of capabilities, which include word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. But until now, Sun only supported StarOffice.Another difference will remain -- Sun does not plan to provide indemnification against lawsuits for OpenOffice.org, as it does for StarOffice, Herring said.Sun&#39;s move comes as OpenOffice.org is being downloaded 1 million times per week with total downloads to date standing at about 110 million, Herring said.Out of that number, Sun estimates that &quot;tens of millions&quot; of people are actively using the software, according to Herring. The most recent version is 2.3. Version 2.4 is expected in March and will contain significant new features, according to the openoffice.org Web site.&quot;Microsoft Office is still the dominant tool out there -- only a fool would deny that,&quot; he said. &quot;But [OpenOffice.org] has had a huge amount of momentum.&quot;Sun believes the average OpenOffice.org user skews younger on average and that download activity in Europe and the U.S. has been greater than in Asian countries, he added.Developers can create extensions to the core OpenOffice.org suite. Sun has made a new one for shaving down the size of presentation files, Herring said. The wizard-like tool goes through a file and asks users whether they want to keep or compress the various elements, he said.Sun plans to provide support for any extensions it creates, according to Herring. As for ones made by third parties, &quot;we would have to work with them on that code on a case-by-case basis,&quot; he said.Sun is also releasing StarOffice 8 Server. Herring described it as a conversion engine that changes 40 document types into PDF files. The server, which costs $11,000, is aimed at enterprises with large stores of legacy documents that aren&#39;t archived with an open standard, according to Herring.
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Increased adoption of Sun's freely distributed Solaris operating system, its recently announced partnership with Intel and other strategic moves  will help the company grow revenue, Sun executives said.
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SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- Executives from Sun Microsystems Inc. outlined their response to the growing popularity of Linux, speaking at the launch on Monday of the most significant update of the Solaris operating system in over two years. Key to the effort is a plan to release Solaris under an open source license with a new subscription pricing model, as well as a software updating system similar to those used by Linux vendors Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc.ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
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Sun is expected Tuesday to ship xVM Ops Center, a datacenter automation console compatible with Linux- and Solaris-based x86 and Sparc environments.Ops Center&#39;s features include automatic installation of firmware and bare-metal operating systems; scanning and tracking of servers in a network; and patch-management tools for SUSE, Red Hat, and Solaris, according to a company statement.James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research, said the last feature is particularly compelling, but not enough to attract a great deal of new business to Sun&#39;s platform.&quot;The patching mechanism they have is very impressive and works with both Linux and Solaris, but given that this is a 1.0 product the appeal will remain mainly with existing Sun customers,&quot; he said via e-mail Friday.&quot;It&#39;s a substantially better entry in systems management than their previous attempts, and much more open,&quot; he added.The Ops Center codebase has already been released under the open-source GPLv3 license and is available at www.openxVM.org.Sun previously said the first commercial version of Ops Center would be available on Jan. 8.Oren Teich, director of product management and marketing for xVM, said the company needed additional time to make some final tweaks and improvements in areas including firmware provisioning and reporting, following requests from early beta users.He disagreed with the notion that mainly existing Sun customers will buy the software, saying the company expects that sales will be split between current and new users. While it is a 1.0 release, code from two existing Sun products, N1 System Manager and Sun Connection, are running under the hood of Ops Center&#39;s GUI, he said. &quot;In some ways, this is a very mature project.&quot;Yet the first version has a key omission: support for Windows. &quot;Although Windows support is not currently available, we&#39;re committed to offering it in the future,&quot; Teich said.Sun is also developing xVM Server, a bare-metal, Xen-based hypervisor with support for Linux, Solaris and Windows guest operating systems.While Sun&#39;s xVM brand stands for &quot;the intersection of virtualization and management,&quot; according to Teich, the Ops Center 1.0 release does not feature a broad range of functionality around virtualization. This summer, Sun will release its hypervisor product and &quot;an update to Ops Center that will have a lot of virtualization capabilities on top of it,&quot; Teich said.The company will battle along with leader VMware, Oracle, Microsoft and an array of other vendors for a stake in the virtualization space, which analysts have pegged as remaining wide-open despite the voluminous hype around the topic in recent years.With Ops Center, Sun will go up against IT management powerhouses such as HP and IBM.Subscription pricing for Ops Center, with support and network-delivered services, ranges between $100 and $350 per managed server per year.
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Looking to get the most out of multi-core processors, a European-driven effort to build a framework for Java-based, real-time applications on modern multi-core chips and parallel processor systems is being announced Tuesday.Called the Java Environment for Parallel Real-time Development, or JEOPARD, the project is being underwritten by the European Commission (EC) to the tune of more than $4.9 million (3.3 million Euros), said The Open Group, which is participating in the project.The objective is to provide tools for platform-independent development of predictable systems that make use of symmetric multiprocessing multi-core platforms and field programmable gate array components, Open Group said. Tools plan would enhance software productivity and reusability by extending processor technology established on desktop systems for the needs of multi-core embedded systems."If you go out and buy a laptop or server, you get four-core processors or whatever. The way people program both applications and OSes hasn't really taken full advantage of the capabilities of these multi-core processors," said Dave Lounsbury, vice president for government services at The Open Group. "This is a hot topic. I think everybody recognizes there are some limitations right now," in making use of multi-core systems, he said.JEOPARD will research how to build APIs, OS extensions and language support for multi-core processors, with a special emphasis on embedded systems, Lounsbury said.The project will delve into extensions to handle different memory configurations. Situations will be considered in which there is not full symmetry, such as when a processor cannot access all parts of memory or chips are not using the same clock, said Lounsbury. These considerations are important because of constraints in memory bandwidth. Languages and operating systems can perform optimizations to address this."The idea here is that we'll see the creation of new sets of tools, whether it's extensions to OSes or new sets of compilers or languages like Java that will bring some of these new capabilities," Lounsbury said.While the project is based around Java, concepts from it could be made to work in other environments, he said. Asked when there might be results from JEOPARD, Lounsbury said the effort is a three-year EC program.Chip vendors could be expected to look closely at the project and incorporate results into their next generations of chips.Contributions from JEOPARD will be to be made to the RTSJ (Real-Time Specification for Java), which focuses on development of portable software in the multi-core embedded space, The Open Group said. Also, JEOPARD will feature development of a platform-independent software development interface for real-time multi-core systems based on RTSJ and Safety-Critical Java. RTSJ is the subject of Java Specification Requests 1 and 282 in the Java Community Process, while Safety-Critical Java is covered in JSR 302.Also participating in JEOPARD are the University of York, FZI, Vienna University of Technology, and the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. Other participants include industrial manufacturers EADS, RadioLabs, and SkySoft and two embedded systems technology suppliers, aicas and Sysgo.In another effort pertaining to development for multi-core chips, RapidMind in November announced RapidMind Multi-core Development Platform v.30, which seeks to help developers build for these processors.
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Sun Microsystems will create an open-source project around its Solaris 10 operating system by the end of the year, company executives said Monday.
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Sun is getting into the open-source business with Solaris, but will this automatically translate into better sales?