Learn Solaris Systems Programming
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(InfoWorld) - The key to Sun's success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday. Sun had 7 million free downloads of Solaris in recent months, and 70 percent of those downloading it have non-Sun hardware in their IT infrastructure, Schwartz said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week in San Francisco. If IT people are running Solaris on hardware from IBM, HP, and Dell, they can be sold Sun hardware to replace those other brands. "If your OS is in front of a customer, you're now given permission to sell everything you've got in your portfolio," Schwartz said. Sun's servers and storage appliances are optimized to run on Solaris, though they can also run on the Linux OS. Sun is approaching the first anniversary ofÂ a restructuring planÂ announced by Schwartz after he took over from Scott McNealy, who remains chairman. Sun has eliminated 4,000 jobs at the company over the last year to reduce costs and there may be more workforce reductions ahead, but only through attrition, Schwartz said. The company currently has about 38,000 employees worldwide. Sun has an opportunity to grow as data centers continue to evolve, Schwartz said. Already, the number of rack-mounted servers has surpassed the number of tower servers sold, and blade servers are on track to outsell rack servers as data centers continue to consolidate. "Why do we even bother with racks?" Schwartz asked during an interview before a roomful of analysts. "Racks are optimized for people to interact with infrastructure. But if you talk to any IT administrator, the last thing they want in their data center is a person because they try to be helpful, but they bend pins and kick plugs and do all kinds of bad things. "The long-term evolution of this marketplace will see data centers emerge in a standardized form factor at large scale," he said. Sun is planning to serve that market with its Project Blackbox, a data center that is installed in a 20-foot shipping container, delivered to a customer and operated from the container. It is scheduled to begin shipping later this year. In its first profitable quarter in more than a year, Sun posted net income of $126 million, or $0.03 per share, on a 7 percent gain in revenue to $3.56 billion, in its fiscal 2007 second quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2006. Analysts, including those at firms besides Morgan Stanley, forecast Sun to earn $0.01 a share in the current quarter on $3.42 billion in revenue. For fiscal 2007, they estimate Sun will earn $0.10 a share on revenue of $14.88 billion, according to an average of analyst estimates from Thomson Financial. In recent months, Sun has begun again to use Intel chips in its hardware. Sun also announced a $700 million investment in the company by KKR Private Equity Investors, the publicly traded fund of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. KKR will also nominate a director to Sun's board. KKR's investment will provide Sun the opportunity to market to all the other firms in which KKR invests, Schwartz said. Â
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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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HOPING to attract more developers worldwide, Sun Microsystems is giving away its latest operating system, Solaris 10, after spending years of development and investing roughly 500 million dollars into the software.
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NEW YORK, November 15  - Sun Microsystems Inc (SUNW.NAS) has introduced the latest version of its operating system, Solaris 10, which would be offered to end-users for free.
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A Sun engineer chartered with directing the engineering effort to open source Solaris has published a new software license that could be used for the open-source release of Sun&#39;s Unix operating system.
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If you were expecting a sneak peak of an open source Solaris or to buy the new commercial version next week, don&#39;t hold your breath.
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Sun Microsystems Inc.  is  revamping its Solaris operating system, incorporating key  pieces of rival Linux software in a move that could gain better  support from developers who have massed behind Linux.
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Ziff Davis - Sun's plans to offer Solaris code to the open-source community leaves some analysts scratching their heads.
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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 Microsystems plans to unveil on Monday the latest version of its flagship Solaris operating system. It also intends to offer a free version of the program to
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BURLINGTON, Mass.--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 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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WITH only two weeks to go before Sun Microsystems enters into the open source foray with its Solaris 10 operating system, the Sta.
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InfoWorld - Sun&#160;has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS.
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(InfoWorld) - With an incremental update to its Solaris 10 OS, Sun is extending the platform's virtualization capabilities to accommodate Linux and Solaris on the same computer. Sun will add to the Solaris Containers capability, which has bolstered server usage by allowing for multiple instances of Solaris on the same server, said Dan Roberts, Sun director of marketing for Solaris. With Solaris 10 8/07, being announced Tuesday, users can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Linux, and Linux applications via Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. "You can now consolidate your Solaris and Linux apps onto one chassis," Roberts said. Solaris Containers debuted in Solaris 10 two-and a half years ago. Virtualization, Roberts noted, has become a popular way to get more out of servers that had been running commonly at only a 10- to 15-percent utilization rate. Because Red Hat and CentOS are only supported on Intel x86 systems, the new Solaris Containers for Linux capability is only supported on that hardware. Customer demand will dictate whether this functionality is extended to other Linux distributions. Sun's accommodation for Linux helps Solaris in its battle for users with Linux, said analyst Richard Jones, vice president at Burton Group. "I see this as a way for [Solaris] to definitely continue to survive in the market because they're now allowing for a greater level of interoperability with Linux," Jones said. The move expands the number of applications and services that could run in a Solaris environment, said Jones.Â  Sun, naturally, sees Solaris as superior to Linux. "You would want to go with this over Linux because you want the most reliable, most secure operating system," as well as features like Solaris Containers, said Roberts. Sun views the upgrade as making it easier to migrate to Solaris. Also with version 8/07, Solaris can be used to manage resources within a container at a finer grain level. "For example, you can now define how much memory or CPU you want a particular app or container to use," said Roberts. This prevents one container from overwhelming an entire system. Users can assure that high-priority applications get the CPU cycles needed. Sun will include separate IP stacks for each container with Solaris 10 8/07 to enable administrators to know how much network bandwidth is being consumed by a container. Determinations could be made on whether to move an application to another server. A Large Send Offload feature reduces CPU workload by offloading networking processing operations to a network interface card. Jumbo Frames support in the 8/07 release means the OS supports very large network packages beyond the 1,500 bytes limit specified in Ethernet. This is useful for applications shipping high volumes of data. Version 8/07 will include a copy of the open-source PostgreSQL 8.2 database, a high-capacity transactional system with performance enhancements for Solaris and support for DTrace probes. These probes provide the ability to observe application performance. Users theoretically could replace an Oracle database with PostgreSQL 8.2 "We fundamentally believe Solaris is the best OS for running databases," Roberts said. Solaris 10 8/07 does not include any technologies from Project Indiana, which is Sun's project to make Solaris more palatable to Linux users by adding capabilities like distribution of Solaris binaries. The project is part of the OpenSolaris effort, which offers Solaris in an open source format. Sun's Solaris is a commercial distribution of the platform.
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As it tries to reclaim former Sun worshippers Comment Sun has announced a series of updates to its flagship Solaris operating system. Solaris 10 11/06 OS enhances efficiency, safety, and reliability.â¦