Sun eyes home users with Sun Ray update
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SAN FRANCISCO - Sun Microsystems on Monday will update its Sun Ray platform with new workstations and server software that company executives believe will give the thin client devices a foothold among home users.
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Sun Microsystems on Friday will unveil more of its plans for OpenSolaris, the open-source project for the Solaris operating system.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun Microsystems is sprucing up its Solaris 10 operating system with security and virtualization improvements. Today's release of Solaris 10 11/06 is intended to make Solaris the most secure OS in existence, said Tom Goguen, Sun vice president of Solaris marketing. Next year, Sun will incorporate the open Xen hypervisor, for virtualization of an OS, into Solaris 10, Goguen said during a press briefing at Sun offices in San Francisco. The new release of Solaris is undergoing governmental Common Criteria Certification based on EAL (Evaluation Assurance Level) 4+ with three Protection Profiles. EAL is a global specification accepted by governments around the world, Goguen said. Featured in the new version of Solaris are trusted extensions, including multilevel security, for attaching a security profile or tag to every object dealt with by the OS, Goguen explained. With this level of security, the OS, for example, could permit someone viewing top secret and secret documents to cut and paste from the top secret to the secret document, but prevent the converse of this. Also featured in the 11/06 release is a "secure by default" capability. "Out of the box, everything is designed to be locked down," said Goguen. Sun's security enhancements are featured in both the commercial and open source variants of Solaris. The open source release is under the jurisdiction of opensolaris.org. The new release also boasts Solaris Containers virtualization technology that provides secure containers for running applications within the OS. The Containers software has been made more mobile, enabling the cloning of a container and the capability to move it to other systems or have it run on an array of systems. With Containers, a user might take a container running a Web server and clone it across multiple machines for more throughput. The Xen hypervisor technology due in the first half of next year will enable virtualization at the OS level. Among the perceived benefits include server consolidation, with users able to manage and use fewer servers. Improved utilization is enabled, Goguen said. "The dirty little secret in the x64 world is these systems are only running at about 10 percent utilization," Goguen said. The hypervisor would run under the control of Solaris, with OS capabilities such as DTrace, for analyzing OS and application behaviors, extended to it. Xen already is available with open source Solaris and will be commercially supported and available for commercial Solaris. Sun with its Solaris enhancements is not looking to upstage Linux in the open source community but does seek to battle commercial distributions of Linux, Goguen said. Sun also is vying with other commercial Unix platforms such as IBM AIX and HP's HP-UX, Sun officials noted. Although Sun in November released the Java programming language under the open source GNU General Public License version 2, the company still is pondering whether GPL is the right route for Solaris. Sun may offer Solaris under GPL 3 when that is finalized. GPL 3 addresses aspects such as the capability to combine software not based on the GPL. Solaris currently is offered under Sun's CDDL (Common Development and Distribution License), which is a Mozilla-style license offering more leeway in combining of code, according to Goguen. By releasing Solaris in an open source fashion, the company recognizes that technologies such as DTrace could be ported to new environments. In 2007, Sun also plans to make major plays to gain the business of so-called Web 2.0 startup companies, Sun officials said. These are being defined by Sun as companies using technology as an advantage for their businesses and who leverage the Web in a more read-write, interactive fashion as opposed to a read-only format. Additionally, Sun will make a stronger play into the X86 leveraging reseller channels, Goguen said.
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Sun is moving to a two-tier development environment in which corporate customers can get the commercial version of Solaris and developers can access the binary version.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. is taking a page from Microsoft Corp.&#39;s security group and changing the way it updates Java for the desktop.
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Sun said Thursday that it had released Java Enterprise System 5.0, a set of subscription-based services that complement enterprise operating systems like the company's own Solaris 10.
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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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Software giant's deal with Sun has raised some questions.
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Not surprisingly, the company advises against using vLite, or other tools that make changes to which components of the OS are installed. Such changes could make a system unstable or prevent future updates from installing properly, it says.
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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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SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW) today unveiled its next generation Sun Ray(TM) Server Software 3.0 an interoperable, platform that enables instant
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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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Microsoft has delayed the rollout of XP Service Pack Two (SP2) for home users, and some customers will not be able to download it until the end of the month. The new code was supposed to go out on Microsoft&#39;s Automatic Update service on ...
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Sun Microsystems plans to unveil the latest version of its flagship Solaris operating system and offer a free version of the program to make it more attractive to corporate and academic computer users.
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Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.Sun SPOT is a Java-based experimental platform intended to enable development of products like wireless sensors, robotics, and communication devices. The open-sourcing is expected to be made official at the Java Mobile &amp; Embedded Developer Days Conference in Santa Clara, Calif., which is being held January 23-24."In this case, I think what's a little bit different is it's not just open-sourcing just the Sun SPOT code," said Roger Brinkley, mobile and embedded community leader at Sun. "It's everything related to Sun SPOT. It's the hardware, it's the software."Included in the open source endeavor would be the Squawk virtual machine featured as part of Sun SPOT. Through the open-source move, Sun hopes to attract more developers to Sun SPOT. "The open-sourcing allows a lot more extension and development to occur," Brinkley said.The plan calls for Sun SPOT to be offered under the GNU General Public License version 2, which means derivatives of GPL code and code that is combined with it must be redistributed. Sun, however, previously has permitted use of the "ClassPath" exception to the GPL, which enables combining of proprietary code with GPL ClassPath libraries without the need to redistribute proprietary code.Contacted afterward, Sun SPOT user Bruce Boyes, president of Systronix, lauded the technology but had concerns about Sun's commitment to it. By classifying the technology as experimental, Sun shows no published commitment to make it available for any period of time commercially, he said. Systronix has been trying to get a commercial license for two years, he said.?"SPOT is a very cool educational and experimental device. We'd like it to become a great commercial and industrial device too. Systronix would like to help make that happen," Boyes said. Systronix is using Sun SPOT in robots, which could be networked and potentially be used in applications, such as roaming of airports to provide security. "We use the Sun SPOT as the application brain," said Boyes.He also expressed concerns about the GPL, which has requirements that can place limits on its use in commercial ventures since software involving it has to be contributed back to the open-source arena. "Open-sourcing would be most interesting if there was a reasonable path to a commercial license," Boyes said.Sun officials were not available to respond to Boyes's concerns on Friday afternoon.In other happenings at next week's conference, application developers in the mobile and embedded space will get together to learn about different topics ranging from virtual machines to mobile clients. Presentations will be done by representatives from such companies as Nokia, Intel and, of course, Sun. James Gosling, CTO of Sun's Client Software who is widely considered the father of Java, will give a keynote presentation on Wednesday.Java, according to to Sun, is on 95 percent of mobile phones shipped today. Sun makes money off of mobile and embedded Java through commercial licenses that feature support services.One topic that is not expected to get a lot of play at the event is Sun's JavaFX and JavaFX Mobile technology. The JavaFX platform, featuring JavaFX Mobile, is intended to provide a consistent and graphical user experience on systems ranging from desktops to mobile devices and other systems. More on JavaFX will be aired at the JavaOne conference in May in San Francisco, a Sun insider said.Currently, Sun's new acquisition, MySQL, maker of the open source database of the same name, has not been factored into Sun's mobile plans, according to Brinkley. Sun agreed to acquire MySQL this week for $1 billion, with the deal expected to close later this quarter or early in the next quarter.
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OS security fix is being rolled out to users who have enabled Automatic Updates.
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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.