You can read more here.

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

We arrived on Sunday night and spent most of Monday sorting out a new suit for me. I'd packed for vacation in Ireland (think cold and wet) and didn't exactly include anything that would have been considered suitable for a business event in London. On a side note, since we ended up near Fleet Street (and my ever suffering wife was being dragged along) we took a short detour to see Temple Church (see Tourist Notes below).

After that it was back to the hotel and I then went out to a dinner with the international press. I always really enjoy these events as they have a broad cross section of press that those of us based in the US rarely get to spend much time with.

Tuesday started off with an analyst breakfast at 7:30am where I was seated next to Vernon Turner of IDC, Vernon is responsible for world-wide research across the server, software, network and services programs for the IT Enterprise at IDC so he talks to a lot of our customers (and competitiors), it's always worthwhile to spend some time with him. Breakfast was followed by press and analyst 1:1s as well as event rehersals and the launch itself. The London event was actually a mirror of the main event which was happening in New York at the same time. After that it was a press conference, more 1:1s and a mixer event which meant that I was finished at 8pm. These events are always a whirlwind as our schedules are packed back to back but there's tremendous value given the sheer number of people we get to talk to in the course of the day.

While I was in London I also had the opportunity to talk to some customers and one in particular stands out, he's the CTO of a major financial services company who was just starting his rollout of Niagara-based systems and has had Opteron boxes in-house for quite some time. He has very high hopes for the UltraSPARC systems as his biggest data center issues are currently around power and cooling (this is something we hear over and over again and exactly what Niagara was designed to help with). I'll be going back there in a few months to see how things are moving along on the SPARC front.

He also had some very interesting comments on Opteron. Compared to equivalent Intel processors CPU-bound applications ran up to *3* times faster and memory bound applications ran up to *1.5* times faster. As a direct result he says his developers love Opteron and he's been seeing significant demand from his customers to deliver solutions based on Solaris on x64-based systems. This is all very good news for Sun.

*Tourist Note* For those of you planning a trip to London, Temple Church is one of the the less well known sites that is definitely worth a visit. It's more popular now since it's mention in The DaVinci Code but the day we went, there were only 4 or 5 other people there. It was originally built in the 1100's and is famous (among other things) for the life-size stone effigies of nine knights from the 13th century. It's literally tucked away in a little side street between Fleet Street and the Thames and is worth taking the time to see.

If you have to travel across the city, the water taxi is also a great option. It just so happened that while I was in London I had an early morning meeting at Canary Wharf and was near the river so I went by water taxi. It's one of the fastest ways to get around during rush hour (assuming you're traveling between two points near the Thames) as well as see some of Londons most famous sites from the water.

Technorati Tags Solaris CoolThreads DaVinci Code UltraSPARC

I really thought it would have been much bigger although that may be partly due to my recent attendance at Java One which has a pretty large hall devoted to vendors. The Sun stand was very busy from what I saw (looking at some of the stands close to ours we did seem to be getting a lot more traffic than a number of other vendors) and I have since heard from other Sun employees that it was very busy all week. Apparently our AMD-based systems have been creating a lot of interest.

Since then things have been a bit hectic, I've just got back from a quick trip to the UK and today, I'm off to Japan to see some customers and partners. One of the customers I met in the UK has some very cool ideas about vendor and system management which I'll distill and post later in the week.

In case you're wondering, we are very serious about making Solaris 10 successful, progress continues on new boot, networking, filesystem and virtualization technologies as well as some really hot systems to run Solaris on. Watch this space.

Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Linux DTrace VMWare

Congratulations to Bryan Cantrill, Stephen Hahn, Adam Leventhal, Cindi McGuire, Andy Rudoff and Mike Shapiro who were chosen for their work on DTrace and Predictive Self-Healing in Solaris 10.

In the related article, two things of interest stand out for me:

Mike's comment "When you look at Solaris 10, if you were to characterize the innovations that are there, none of them are really changing the programming model for applications, the operating system is empowering people to do something with the software that they already had or the ideas that they already had of how to solve problems". This comment gets right to the core of why these features are so revolutionary, your existing applications can be improved simply by being run on Solaris 10, AND they're guaranteed to work.

The second thing is a statement from the writer of the article, Neill McAllister, "Solaris arguably remains the only source of innovation in the enterprise Unix market". Personally, I think Solaris is one of the few places where *operating system innovation* is happening today. These guys (and the hundreds of others working on Solaris) make it an absolute blast to work in the Solaris team, my job is so much easier than my counterparts at HP, IBM, RedHat etc. Technorati Tags Solaris UNIX DTrace Predictive Self-Healing HP IBM RedHat

A lot happens when you've been out for a few weeks, the total number of Solaris 10 registered licenses has been rocketing (more on that later) and there have been Solaris sightings all over the place (at Live 8 and the British Formula 1 Grand Prix in the UK to name just two). It appears that even the folks over at google have started to show a wacky sense of humor.

On a somewhat (although not really) related note this is an interesting article from the BBC on "Moon Trees", it even has a link where you can buy descendants of the originals. It doesn't have much to do with Solaris but it is about trees from the moon and well, how often do you get to talk about that?

Technorati Tags Solaris Live8 F1 MoonTrees

Even though we generally know that some form of announcement is coming from a competitor, we usually have to wait to see it in order to respond. That tends to introduce some serious bumps on the road to effective time management (marketing isn't all cappucino's and advertising you know). In an industry where there's new announcements coming out every day, this can lead to a pretty hectic work environment.

The flipside is of course, that being at the "pointy end of the ship" I occasionally have to attend customer, partner and analyst events (which is usually a lot less glamorous than it sounds, actually, I'm not sure it sounds all that glamorous). Having said that, every once in a while we get to do something thats a lot of fun.

You may have read about the work that Bono (the singer in U2) is doing to help eradicate poverty in Africa, it's a truly unique campaign that has garnered a huge amount of interest recently and I'm very proud that Sun (and Solaris) is a part of it. In less than six weeks some of the very bright individuals here at Sun put together an enterprise class mobility solution that allows Bono to recruit audience members at U2 concerts into the One campaign via their cell phones.

It's all running on Solaris 10 on Sun V20Z and V40Z servers and results in a pretty special moment during U2's show. At a certain point in the night audience members are asked to text their names to UNITE (86483 try it yourself). As U2 play, all those names are aggregated through two datacenters, one in Singapore and the other in the US and are then some are randomly chosen for display on a large video screen above the band - all in less than 10 seconds.

The names are registered with the One campaign and the next day everyone who texted receives an email explaining how they can become more involved. I urge you to try it, it's a really fascinating use of technology and more importantly, it's the right thing to do from a social perspective. What has this got to do with marketing? I'm getting to that.

A few weeks ago I ended up taking some Sun customers to a U2 concert in Boston to show them this technology in action, and even better, Danny (one of the people who developed the system) let me hang out with him and monitor the system at work during the part of the show where this happens. It was a truly unique experience and one of those once in 10 years things that helps keep the job interesting, and I got to see U2.

The next morning I was going through my mail and saw that the Holy See (aka the Vatican, yes, that Vatican) had chosen Sun as part of their infrastructure only weeks after reportedly moving to Solaris when their existing (TRU64) systems failed to cope with the demands being put on them after the death of Pope John Paul II.

Now, where I come from, when you can claim Bono AND the Pope as customers, it's time to either retire or move on to something new but something else happened later in the day that has convinced me to stick with Solaris.

While I was going through security screening at the airport on my way home, my laptop was taken away for an additional security check. The TSA screener who brought it back started a surprising conversation that went something like this:

Screener: "Nice laptop. Are you running Solaris on it?" Me: *Stunned Silence* "Yes" Screener: "8 or 9?" Me: "10" Screener: "Cool, I'll have to try it" It turns out that in the past he'd worked for a company that installed some networking into a conference center and he'd been exposed to Solaris there (in case you're wondering, I wasn't wearing any Sun or Solaris branded clothing). Where else am I going to be able to work on a product that's as good as Solaris 10 and has such interesting and diverse customers?

About halfway through the article the writer talks about how Solaris is powered by BSD which isn't exactly true. Back in the pre-Solaris (or more explicitly pre-SunOS 5.0) days our OS was based on BSD however the current release of Solaris is based on System V Release 4 and has been since the early 90's.

Read on MacDuff

My name is Christopher Ratcliffe and I'm the Director of Solaris Marketing for Sun. I'm currently based in California (although I'm originally from Northern Ireland - more on that later) and I've been with Sun for about 9 years. What that means is I have overall responsibility for the product management and marketing of the Solaris Operating System.

I get to work with some of the smartest people on the planet (both sun employees and customers) and I talk to a LOT of people about Solaris and how it can help them. It's an incredibly entertaining job as the OS occupies a unique position within any environment: It's the keystone to the whole system.

The OS supports the system and can optimize performance and mitigate faults. It also supports all the software on the system, and can add additional stability, security, performance and even functionality to existing applications. Why does the right OS matter? Because problems in the compute world are not getting any easier. The amount of work, the reliability of the work, the security of the work, and the cost of the work can be strongly affected by the OS.

Because of that I get to find out about the really difficult problems people have to solve in a whole range of environments - Banks, Governments, Telcos, Retail, Space Exploration, Rock Concerts, Hardware, Software, Menswear etc etc,

My intention is to talk about some of the cool things we're doing with Solaris as well as what other people are doing and believe me, there's some really amazing stuff happening in the Solaris world. I may even throw in some commentary on what's happening outside of Sun (which I'm sure will please our lawyers to no end).

So read on, I'll do my best to keep things interesting and up to date.