I'm not sure they do, but their sponsorship of these awards is an example of interesting timing to say the least.

You can read more here.

Charlie Schluting over at ServerWatch has just written a review of Solaris 10 6/06 (aka Update 2) which is pretty good. He hits on all the right things, in particular ZFS, Predictive Self-Healing and PostgreSQL as well as some of the performance improvements.

What's most interesting is the comments he makes in terms of comparing ZFS to Veritas VXVM and VFS. The thing to do as you're reading this is just keep repeating this little mantra:

Solaris is Free, Solaris is Free, Solaris is Free......

Technorati Tags Solaris Veritas VXVM VXFS OpenSolaris x64 PostgreSQL ZFS

This is an interesting article from InforWorld on what's driving Sun's increasing server revenues. It's pretty short and to the point but pretty much hits the nail on the head IMHO.

If you're a current Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 user, there are some changes coming your way that you may or may not know about. Things here have been unusually hectic so in all likelihood this is old news but I thought I'd cover it anyway.

RHEL3 goes into maintenance mode on November 1st of this year. That means that customers will only get Security errata and select mission critical bug fixes from that date forward. That's a pain for a couple of reasons:

1. Red Hat doesn't guarantee compatibility between releases (unlike Solaris).

And

2. RHEL 4 hasn't been widely adopted and as a result only offers support for 474 hardware platforms and 997 apps (according to redhat.com). Solaris 10 on the other hand currently supports over *700* x64/x86 systems and has over *1560* currently shipping x64/x86 apps. One thing to note is that Red Hat also seems to double count systems on their hardware lists. I also think their number includes various POWER platforms etc which I don't really count as I've yet to meet a customer who has one.

We won't mention the multi-award winning functionality today.

You also don't have to take my word for it. Take a look at what a DTrace Commando I know has to say about the whole thing.

For those of you who don't have the stomach for that *8 page* piece, slide on over to the Replace Red Hat pages on sun.com. There's some info, documentation and tools there that may interest you. We'll update this site regularly so watch out for more info, offers, tools, and docs etc over the coming weeks.

We also announced today that the upcoming Solaris 10 11/06 is in evaluation at EAL4+ with three protection profiles (LSPP, RBACPP and CAPP), that will qualify it as the most secure OS on the planet. What's currently the most secure OS on the planet? Well, actually, that would be Solaris too.

Technorati Tags Solaris EAL4 RHEL3 DTrace Red Hat Linux OpenSolaris x64 Security

After quite some time, we've managed to get the DTrace Commando to write a blog. It's currently posted on the BigAdmin web site where he'll start posting regularly as we move forward.

He's also going to start adding DTrace and Sytem Administration tips, tricks and hints to the BigAdmin Newsletter.

Sign up now.

Technorati Tags Solaris DTrace OpenSolaris

The Yankee Group has just released it's latest Server Reliability Survey which is notable in that it isn't sponsored i.e. they haven't been paid to do the survey by a particular vendor. This should have the effect of it being a bias-free report.

The OS which they think has made the biggest improvement over the last year is Windows 2003 which was bested by "only Unix-based server operating systems including HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10". According to Yankee, Windows led Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20% more annual uptime in similar deployment scenarios.

I'd love to talk to the analysts who did this about how they accounted for the Predictive Self-Healing functionality in Solaris 10. Our internal testing shows that running Solaris 10 (the only OS on the planet with Predictive Self-Healing) can result in over 50% reductions in annual system downtime.

With the soon-to-be-released 6/06 update to Solaris 10, customers will now have complete Predictive Self-Healing functionality on all AMD-based platforms regardless of whether it's a Sun manufactured system or one from Dell, HP, IBM (or anyone else who makes AMD64 based systems).

There's some more interesting snippets here, but for the whole thing you'll have to buy the report.

For more on Predictive Self-Healing in Solaris 10, go here.

Technorati Tags Solaris Red Hat Linux OpenSolaris Windows AIX Predictive Self-Healing

This isn't my opinion (well, it is, but this time it's not me saying it), it's the opinion of of 75 U.S. and 25 European chief information officers. It's taken from an interesting article in Forbes and is based on a report from Merrill Lynch. See for yourself here.

When you combine this with the Gartner Dataquest's recent market share numbers, this starts to look like it's a bit of a trend.

Technorati Tags Solaris Red Hat Linux OpenSolaris Forbes

The fact that OpenSolaris won a 2006 Codie probably isn't news to anyone except those of us behind in reading our email. Having said that, the thing that jumped off the web page for me was some of the competition in the Best Open Source Solution category.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was also a finalist (but they didn't win, did I mention that OpenSolaris did?).

We appear to be establishing a bit of a trend as last year Red Hat Desktop was beaten out by NetBeans 3.6 in the same category.

Technorati Tags Solaris Red Hat Linux OpenSolaris NetBeans

This years JavaOne has been an absolute whirlwind. It's usually not that big a Solaris event but this year the requests for interviews from the media and analysts have been somewhat overwhelming so I haven't been able to get on to the show floor as much as I'd like. The good news is that, as of last night, we'd DTraced 5 apps and hadn't had to give away any iPods. Interestingly we have doubled the performance of one application and reduced the startup time on another by almost 70%.

Traffic hasn't been as high as last year but we can probably attribute that to the fact that Adam wasn't on stage shilling for us like he was last year.

More later....

Technorati Tags Solaris DTrace JavaONE

It's back! After last years successful run we will once again issue the Solaris Performance Challenge at JavaOne. If you are coming to JavaOne next week, you can enter to receive a performance improvement for your Java application, otherwise you'll get an iPod or a Sony PSP.

If you‘re a developer coming to JavaOne this year, visit the Solaris pods (#737 and #739) at the Sun booth to check out what the most advanced operating system on the planet has to offer.

Bring us your Java™ applications (on a CD-ROM, USB drive or a plain old laptop with an ethernet card) and we‘ll use Solaris 10 to improve their performance. If we can‘t find any additional performance gains for your app, you‘ll win a cool prize such as an iPod or a Sony PSP.

Please bear in mind that this only applies to real world applications, “Hello World” and benchmarks don‘t really count, the basic rules are: 1) This applies to real-world applications which serve a useful purpose in a production environment only. 2) Your application must contain at least 2,000 lines of *code*. 3) Your application should run with JVM 1.5 or later. 4) If your application runs in an application server, it must be the latest version of Sun Java System Application Server, BEA Weblogic, or IBM WebSphere. If your app doesn't meet these requirements, come over anyway, we‘ll take a shot at it but if we don‘t get an improvement, you don‘t get a prize.

The Legal Stuff™ Offer open to all conference attendees 18 years of age or older, except employees of Sun Microsystems and residents of countries subject to US embargo. Offer valid only while supplies last.

Last year, we worked on 16 applications with *15* of those getting performance increases of between 5% and 280% so it's worth a look.

Further to my previous post, you can get more info, video and audiocasts of Sun's recent Analyst Summit here.

I've just got back from our annual Analyst Conference which is always a very intense few days as there are lots of presentations to prepare for as well as a lot of 1:1's with analysts. This year was particularly busy with some outstanding customer panels and testimonials. The one that blew us all away was Marc Andreessen (yes, the Mosaic/Netscape/Aol/Opsware Marc Andreessen), the founder of Ning and what he had to say about Sun in general and Solaris in particular. Check it out for yourself, the video is here, and a brief overview is here. Ning in itself is interesting from a community/participation perspective. Technorati Tags Solaris Linux OpenSolaris Ning x64

eWeek has just published it's list of 2005's best innovations and upgrades and it's nice to see not just Solaris 10 but Java Studio Creator 2 as well. They also published a list of the years flops which makes for interesting reading and fortunately, doesn't include any Sun products. Technorati Tags Solaris Java Java Studio

I just came across an article in CIO Today magazine that made me think of an interesting discussion that occasionally comes up when we talk to the press and analysts. Basically, it's an article about IBM offering services and a free toolkit to "help assist assessing and migrating Solaris C/C++ applications from Solaris SPARC to Linux on IBM Systems". To help decode whats being said here, when IBM say "Solaris SPARC" they mean Solaris running on SPARC-based systems, Solaris is Solaris, it's the same source tree with the same feature set regardless of the underlying hardware. When they say Linux, they mean RedHat, that's what they run on their systems but that's beside the point. The bigger question I ask when I see these articles and program announcements is why would you want to move from Solaris to any other OS, including Red Hat?

The reasons cited are normally things like cost, performance, platform choice, openness and my favorite, innovation. So lets briefly take a look at each one of them:

*Cost* This is just bogus, Solaris 10 is available today free of charge, just go here and you can download it for free or go here and purchase a media kit for $50 (sorry, we can't give the media kits away for free as they cost us money to produce but the license is till free, put it on 1000 systems if you want). Not only is Solaris 10 free, you can also get the entire Solaris Enterprise System which includes pre-integrated, pre-tested Identity, High-Availability, Web Services, Communications, and Application Platform components with a complete set of developer tools. You can use them all, develop, test and deploy for free. At some point you might want support, come to us and we'll provide it on more systems for less cost than Red Hat. *Performance* How about 49 performance world records, they've all been achieved in the last year on platforms running Solaris. Platforms that range in size from single CPU x64/x86 boxes all the way up to massive, multicore UltraSPARC-based systems. We've done a huge amount of work in Solaris 10 to not just make it faster out of the box (some customers have seen up to 300% performance improvements just by upgrading to Solaris 10), but make it easier to diagnose existing performance problems (or any other type of problem you care to mention) through the use of Dynamic Tracing (DTrace). Customers using DTrace have seen additional performance improvements of up to 30x, yes, that's thirty times faster. Nobody else has anything that even comes close to DTrace, sure, they're trying to catch up, but we're not sitting still, we continue to work on DTrace and other features in Solaris to keep us ahead of our competitors. *Platform Choice* If you want platform choice, we have it. Solaris 10 supports almost 600 systems from vendors as diverse as Sun, HP, IBM, Dell, Fujitsu and a broad range of others. Of that number over 450 are x64/x86 based systems, check out the Solaris 10 HCL if you don't believe me (it includes a whole wad of IBM systems). And if you want support, it starts out at $120 per processor per year. That's Sun enterprise class support, we work on your problems 24 hours a day and you won't see us asking "Has anyone else seen this before?" on internet message boards. And while we're on the topic of platforms if you want world record price performance on industry standard hardware, check out our range of x64-based systems, if you want world record performance at a fraction of the power and cooling requirements of other vendors, check out our latest UltraSPARC T1-based systems. You can even try one out for free. *Openness* Solaris is open, it's available through the OpenSolaris community and theOSI-approved CDDL. We've made new features like ZFS and BrandZ available to the OpenSolaris community before they've made it into a commercial Solaris distribution. We've made the massive amount of new features and countless patents in Solaris available to anyone who wants them, even our unique features like DTrace and Solaris Containers. We have over 10,000 members in the OpenSolaris community and are accepting code from outside Sun into the Solaris code base. Those community members are already working on a number of projects including a Power port of Solaris so at some point in the future, you'll be able to run Solaris on *ALL* your IBM hardware. As a side note, Sun and Solaris was started more than 20 years ago through open source technology, namely BSD Unix. Today we are the largest contributor of open source software to the community and we don't stop there. We ship almost 200 open source applications with Solaris including bind, Samba, Postgres and many others, we also offer complete enterprise support for a large number of those applications. *Innovation* There's so much innovation in Solaris 10 it's hard to know where to start, Solaris 10 has over 600 new features, a large number of which you won't get anywhere else including DTrace, Solaris Containers, Predictive Self-Healing, and Process Rights Management. We continue to innovate with things like ZFS, BrandZ, Trusted Extensions and Secure Execution. We've taken what we learned building the only OS that truly scales and delivered it on small, high performance, multi-core systems, we've taken mainframe-class availability features and delivered them on industry standard x64 hardware. The same feature set you get on SPARC systems is what you get on x86 systems, that's why Solaris 10 and the people who developed it have won a number of awards from places like eWeek and InfoWorld over the last year.

Having said all this, the biggest innovation in Solaris means nothing to our customers. What do you have to do to move your existing SPARC apps to the new UltraSPARC T1 systems? Nothing. They're guaranteed to run on Solaris 10 so just run them.

What do you have to pay? Nothing. The OS, our apps and our tools are all free.

What about if you want to move from SPARC to an x64/x86 system running Solaris or vice versa? Well, it's not quite nothing, all you need to do is a recompile, that's it.

We don't need a migration kit to move you from Solaris 2.6 or 7 or 8 or 9 to Solaris 10, or from SPARC to x64/x86 or x64/x86 to SPARC because we guarantee binary AND source compatability. No one else offers a guarantee like this because they can't.

If you're thinking of moving from Solaris to something else, I'd suggest you take a look at what we have to offer today in terms of features and hardware support, you won't get anything that comes close anywhere else. Alternatively, if like many customers, you want to move from Red Hat or AIX or HP-UX or whatever to Solaris, we'll help. We'll provide you with the information, tools and if necessary, services to move you to Solaris 10. If you're not comfortable moving your apps and systems yourself, we'll help. We'll make your apps faster, more secure and more robust without touching the source code. Watch this space, I'll talk more about these tools and services in the new year. Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones ZFS DTrace CoolThreads Red Hat Linux OpenSolaris IBM AIX x64

The first official update to Solaris 10 went live on the download center earlier today, you can download it (as well as the entire Solaris Enterprise System) at the Sun Download Center.

This update includes a number of enhancements including a very cool new boot system for x64/x86 platforms (it uses GRUB and is much faster than with the initial release), additional network performance enhancements and support for all the new platforms we've released in the last few months as well as a number of bug fixes and other features.

We're already at over 3.6 million registered Solaris 10 licenses at the moment and this release should help accelerate that to over 4 million sometime in early 2006.

Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Enterprise System GRUB UltraSPARC x64