Wednesday March 28, 2007

Solaris Networking has always been known to be on the cutting edge of innovation- whether it is sterling performance, or next generation virtualization and resource control.. Clearly, one cannot build an imposing structure without a strong foundation and Solaris is no exception. Several engineering years of building high quality infrastructure is one reason why Sun is reclaiming its position in the workstation and server marketplace.
While having high quality plumbing is a prerequisite whether you are building a home or an operating system, many people these days like shiny fixtures to go along. And of course the solution needs to be elegant and easy to use. For many years, Sun customers have thought of Solaris Networking to be that way- very high quality and capable of heavy lifting but somewhat challenging to use.

Why is this important? For starters, an approachable Solaris will enable both developers and customers to use it more easily and help grow the community of Sun users. It will make Solaris a stronger contender for mobile platforms and for small and medium business customers. The latter often lack dedicated and advanced Unix configuration expertise. Finally, recent Linux distros and OS X have lifted the bar on configuration and management user interfaces and Solaris needs to do a better job competing in this area. At the same time, traditional data center customers need to lower TCO by reducing administration and management complexity.

After spending over a year working on design, we are in the process of implementing and delivering on the promise of significantly simplified and automated Solaris network configuration and management via an exciting new project that we call Network Auto Magic. Network Auto Magic or NWAM for short has a thriving community on OpenSolaris so join in and give us your feedback. Better yet, download the prototype and give it a spin! We are planning on releasing the prototype via OpenSolaris in the very near future so stay tuned. And there is much more to come. John Beck recently presented at the Bay Area OpenSolaris User Group meeting.