Sun Launches OpenSolaris

May 5, 2008

Sun Microsystems, has made its OpenSolaris Operating System (OS) available. OpenSolaris, based on Sun's Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration, delivers an unrivaled development and deployment environment offering the right mix of rapid innovation, platform stability and support to meet business and development needs.

"OpenSolaris is a massive advancement for OS development and deployment. It combines the strong foundation of Solaris technologies and tools with modern desktop features and applications developed by open source communities such as GNOME, Mozilla and the Free Software Foundation," said Stephen Lau, OpenSolaris Governing Board member. "OpenSolaris provides an ideal environment for students, developers and early adopters looking to learn and gain experience with innovative technologies like ZFS, Zones and DTrace. And yes, it uses bash by default."

The OpenSolaris OS was designed as a platform for innovation to enable developers to quickly develop, test, trouble-shoot and deploy their new web services, HPC and network applications. LiveCD installation and the new network-based OpenSolaris Image Packaging System (IPS) simplify and speed installation and integration with third-party applications. OpenSolaris IPS increases installation speed and accuracy by providing better control of applications and dependencies and offers easy-to-use system management.

"The Network Economy has ushered in new, dramatically different business models that have changed both the pace and approach with which individuals, communities and companies compete and succeed. It is critical for the participants in this new market to have the right tools and technologies to meet these challenges. From a software perspective, it's clear that open source is the right approach and that OpenSolaris provides the platform to participate, innovate and ultimately succeed," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems. "I'm tremendously proud of the work the OpenSolaris community has put forth and believe the new OpenSolaris OS sets the innovation benchmark for what's possible in an open source world."

The OpenSolaris OS is the first OS to feature ZFS as its default file system, protecting work with instant roll-back and continual check-summing capabilities to allow users to test ideas. Its Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) feature provides safe, pervasive observability of production systems to accelerate application development and optimization of the AMP/MARS stack. Additionally Solaris Containers let you build virtualization-aware applications that can be deployed on more than 1,000 systems, from single machines through multi-CPU and multi-core systems, without worrying whether integrating third-party software will work.

OpenSolaris OS is also available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Through the OpenSolaris-Amazon collaboration, customers will have access to Sun's innovative open source software, MySQL premium technical support, as well as key features of the OpenSolaris OS, such as ZFS and Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) running on Amazon's cloud computing platform. Now, developers, enterprises, startups and students have enhanced options and support for rapid development and fast Web deployment on a Web-scale compute infrastructure, with capacity-on-demand.

Reliant Security announced it is leveraging the OpenSolaris OS to improve its payment card data security for merchants who need to meet challenging payment card industry data security requirements. "Reliant made a strategic decision to base its Managed PCI System (MPS) product on OpenSolaris because other operating systems didn't meet our security requirements and system resource constraints. With the support of the OpenSolaris community, we have been able to meet a very aggressive production rollout of MPS and are proud to participate in the launch of the first community distribution of OpenSolaris," said Richard Newman, managing partner of Reliant Security.