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

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

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

InfoWorld have just announced their Top 10 Moments in IT for 2005 and they've included the open sourcing of Solaris for "helping fuel a much broader acceptance of open source technology in the enterprise".

You can read more here: http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/12/19/51NNyearinreview_1.html

Technorati Tags Solaris OpenSolaris

Who would have thought it'd be this hard to keep my blog up to date, I guess I'm just not trying hard enough. The last couple of months have been pretty wild, we've announced and/or released a ton of new products e.g. Postgres for Solaris, ZFS, Xen, Solaris Enterprise System, Niagara-based systems etc etc. So much in fact that it's been hard to keep, well, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Since we appear to be heading into a more quiet time here, I'm going to get back on track with posting updates on what we're doing, where and with whom.

We may as well start with some of the good stuff and it doesn't get much better than free iPods. Yes, we have another way for anyone outside of Sun to get a free iPod and it couldn't be easier. Just tell us why you love Solaris, that's it, no catches.

We're really interested in the things people have to say about Solaris 10 but to be honest, if you say something about *any* version of Solaris, including OpenSolaris you have a good chance at being included. The other thing to note is that we're also happy to hear what you don't like, that feedback is always interesting to us.

So get writing, two winners are chosen at random each month.

Technorati Tags Solaris OpenSolaris Postgres ZFS Xen Solaris Enterprise System CoolThreads iPod

Tim has written another piece on Xen which includes an easily missed Solaris Containers related note: "one of the IBM VM technologists stood up and said that Solaris Zones solved the problem of managing multiple OS images really well, and how their customers were asking for it, and how he wished the Linux community could extend projects like vservers to try to solve those problems in a similar way. Since IBM has been working on virtualization technologies for many, many years, and I have a lot of respect for their technology and experience in this area, I took that as quite a compliment to what we built in Solaris 10."

It's refreshing to hear a comment along these lines from an engineer at one of our competitors. Recently it's felt like every week or so there's another vendor sponsored or even vendor written "technical document" comparing Solaris 10 to an offering from one our competitors. Usually they go to great lengths to confuse the reader and explain how their product will have better functionality in a "future release".

The best ones are those that are marked for "internal use only", these wonders of misinformation most often get "left behind" at customer sites. This particular type of document seems to be based on the belief that customers don't actually do any fact checking and generally believe most of what they read. They make for very interesting reading, the attacks on DTrace and Containers always providing some outstanding misdirection, stretching of the truth and basic misleading information.

If you're wondering how we get them (they do say "for internal use only" after all), we sometimes use google, you can occasionally find them with a well refined search, or more frequently, customers just give them to us. This usually happens in conjunction with either a request for a response or a comment to the effect that they don't like being treated like idiots.

Personally, I can quite enjoy a bit of namecalling etc but when it comes to the technical papers, marketing people should be helping their engineering counterparts to focus on improving their products, not writing rubbish that most customers will either ignore or see through.

Chris's Disclaimer Any bad behaviour on my part either in the past or the future cannot be used as evidence against my stance in this blog entry. I'm allowed to take the high ground as our product is better than everyone elses, I know, I have the documents to prove it and I'd share them but they're marked "internal use only" I'm afraid.

*91* of the *Fortune 100* can't be wrong (they're all using Solaris 10). Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Google

There's an interesting article up on itjungle this morning. Timothy Prickett Morgan has some estimates on Solaris 10 adoption rates for 2006.

One of the little known projects we've been working on recently is Xen support for Solaris. For the uninitiated, Xen is an Open Source software project that supports running multiple instances of an operating system on a single platform. The good news from our team last week was that we've successfully booted more than one instance of Solaris on a single platform.

While it is still early days, we're making good progress and interestingly, the system referred to in the original "Hello World" was a 2-way Opteron box running Solaris and Linux side-by-side. What this means to our users is that the fourth pillar in our server virtualization strategy is up and running, with any luck we should have a technology preview available in the coming months.

One of the questions this begs is "why are you investing in multiple virtualization technologies that essentially solve the same problem?" and the answer is pretty straight forward, as with many Solaris features it's all about choice.

Server virtualization can have many different meanings depending on a number of different factors, e.g. the problem you're trying to solve, the business your in, platform availability etc. Our belief is that there is no one size fits all answer to the problem and our solutions reflect that.

The four pillars (as I see them) are Hardware Partitioning with Dynamic System Domains, Server Virtualization with Xen, Resource Management with Solaris Resource Manager (unique name huh?) and OS virtualization with Solaris Containers.

I won't go into great detail here but customers can choose the virtualization technology they want based on the problem they're trying to solve, I tend to think of it in terms of a couple simple questions:

*Question 1:* Do you need to run multiple different OS versions on the same platform? If YES go to Question 2, otherwise go to Question 3.

*Question 2:* Do you want the multiple OS versions to be electrically isolated? If YES, choose Dynamic System Domains, if not, go with a Hypervisor technology like Xen or VMWare.

*Question 3:* Do you want to isolate multiple applications and/or users on the same system from one another. If YES, choose Solaris Containers, if not, go with Solaris Resource Manager.

These questions verge on oversimplification but they get to the heart of the problem and provide a good basis for discussing how the technologies can then be used together to provide additional levels of flexibility.

Technorati Tags Solaris Solaris Containers Zones Xen Virtualization Dynamic System Domains Solaris Resource Manager VMWare

One of the side effects of working in a company that has as strong an email culture as Sun is that you rarely, if ever, get snail mail. It's so rare that I actually get any mail that it's a bit of an event when I get something actually useful and not just flyers for conferences etc . That made it all the more surprising this morning when I got a letter bearing the return address of a commander in the US Army.

Anyone who's ever met me will be happy to tell you that I don't really fit in the "Army of One" category, and I'm pretty sure that I'm not eligible for any form of draft (not since accidently (almost) sparking an international incident on the Irish border in my youth).

It turns out that when we were running the DTrace Challenge at Java One, our "DTrace Commando" Jarod did some work with a representative of the US army. Based on the recommendations Jarod made within *30 minutes*, they saw their application startup time drop from 20 seconds to 5 seconds, a *75% reduction*.

Unfortunately there's no medal but he did get an official letter of commendation, that's pretty cool, it's just a pity we didn't charge government contractor rates......

Technorati Tags Solaris DTrace USArmy