Sun Microsystems on Monday
will launch a supported version of OpenSolaris at the CommunityOne
conference in San Francisco.

After working on OpenSolaris for three years, Sun now has a supported distribution,
called 2008.5, available.

"It's a major milestone in the development of OpenSolaris, and opens the
door for more deployments," said Kjell Högström, senior systems
engineer at Sun in Sweden.

An official price list for support will become available on May 13, according
to a spokeswoman for Sun. However, prices for OpenSolaris Support will compare
to other support services on the market, she adds.

Sun from now on will upgrade OpenSolaris every six months.

Sun sees several opportunities for the open-source version of Solaris. For
one, it wants OpenSolaris to become a part of the burgeoning cloud computing
trend. The company will be working with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
platform.

Högström also wants to compete with Linux and the LAMP software stack,
which combines Linux with the Apache Web server, database server MySQL, which
Sun owns, and programming languages Perl, PHP and Python.

"AMP is the important part, the operating system is there to support the
applications, and we can do that at least as good as Linux," said Högström.

But it won't be able to compete with Linux overnight.

"We first have to earn the trust of customers," said Högström.

He still sees existing customers using the regular-version Solaris in the data
center for applications like databases, but OpenSolaris is becoming popular
among developers.

There are a couple of features that will give OpenSolaris an edge over other
open-source based operating systems, according to Högström.

Two of the most important ones are file system ZFS (Zettabyte File System)
and DTrace (Dynamic Tracing), which back in January 2005 was the first part
of Solaris to get open-sourced. It is used to analyze, debug and tune system
behavior.

"DTrace is a very flexible tool, and it lets you quickly gather measurements.
You can use it when the system is up and running, and you don't have to wait
for something to happen again," said Högström.

In ZFS Sun has added installation support, something regular Solaris lacks.
It will speed up the installation process and use less storage. It also offers
support for instant rollback.

Another important feature is OpenSolaris Image Packaging System, which enables
packages to be pulled from a network directory -- the standard way of doing
things in Linux. Solaris features to do the same thing are starting to get a
little long in the tooth.

Sun faces several challenges on the road to success, according to Gartner.
It must represent the Linux GNU users without sacrificing the stable brand image
of Solaris.

Sun will also have to build a vibrant community with innovation that can keep
up with Linux, while maintaining compatibility and stability, and build reference
implementations for independent software vendors that minimize re-certifications,
Gartner said in a recent report.

OpenSolaris is licensed using Community Development and Distribution License
(CDDL), not GPL, which Sun has caught some flack for. But the possibility to
mix open- and closed-source code, which GPL doesn't allow, gives it more flexibility,
according to Högström.

» posted by abennett

IDG News Service

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