Yesterday we announced that there have been over 2 million registered licenses for Solaris 10 distributed since January 31st, for the statistics fans among you, that's over 300,000 licenses a month. What's even more revealing is the platform split, it's roughly one third on SPARC and two thirds on x64/x86.

Add to this the fact that Solaris has consistently shipped on more platforms than any other UNIX operating system (such as AIX and HP-UX) and we have a monstrous installed base that is expanding incredibly quickly. For example, according to IDC, for 2004 the leading worldwide UNIX Operating System in terms of units shipped was Solaris and in the first quarter of 2005? yep, it was Solaris.

When we originally made Solaris available for download, we had no idea of the level of interest we'd see. I was pretty sure it would be significant but you just never know with these things. Add to that the fact that the download went live on the first morning of our annual analysts conference (where we had already told all the attendees that we had just gone live and we'd keep them updated throughout the day), it was just a little bit nerve wracking.

Fortunately, within an hour I got a call to say we'd grossly underestimated the demand and were frantically adding more resources to the download center to keep up. Not only that but someone had already put a DVD they'd burned up on ebay and it was trading at $25. By the end of the first day we had over 70,000 registered licenses distributed and it hasn't really slowed down since.

6 months later as I sit and look at the list of companies that have registered licenses for Solaris 10 it makes for very interesing reading. Virtually the entire Fortune 100 is there with many of them installing hundreds and thousands of copies. The stand out for me is the number of major competitors that made it onto the list, on opening day there was more than one in the top 10, no doubt they were just looking for inspiration...

Technorati Tags Solaris UNIX AIX HP-UX

It has to be said that over the last few years I haven't had much need to practice my system administration skills. It's just too easy when your primary system is a SunRay. All I've really had to do is upgrade my laptop to the latest Solaris release and then add occasional bits and pieces of software. I've never patched my laptop (which is running Solaris) even though I know that's really not a clever thing to do, I could never seem to find the time.

Interestingly enough, if my laptop was running any OS other than Solaris, I'd have been happily patching it regularly, it just seemed to do fine on it's own. This alos seems to be the view shared by many Sun customers, I can't tell you how many times I've spoken to customers who say they still have isloated instances of Solaris 2.4 and 2.5 (or earlier) running somewhere in their environment because "it just works".

Just before the break one of my colleagues pointed me to the Sun Update Connection System Edition Preview, which I installed and have been quite happily using since. While I can't say it makes me a better administrator overall, it certainly makes keeping my system up to date very simple. For the first time in literally years I have a laptop with a completely up-to-date version of Solaris running on it and not only that, I now have the ability to update my other Solaris systems remotely. Will there be no end to my productivity?

I've been primarily using the GUI and have it set up to let me know when updates are available, however, I don't let it automatically install anything. I still want to have some hand in the process but if it keeps working the way it has been recently, I may well set it on fully automatic for at least security patches. Overall I've been very satisfied and from what I hear, most of the other folks trying it seem to agree.

Technorati Tags Solaris SunRay

One of the things I tell customers when I talk to them about Solaris 10 is that many years ago, I used to administer a largish collection of Sun servers. In the intervening years I've worked in and around many datacenters and from what I know and have seen, if I was an administrator today, I would run all my applications and services in Solaris Containers. Everything, web servers, databases, app servers, etc etc. Why? Well, Solaris Containers are unique in that they offer security and fault isolation with virtually no resource overhead.

I was talking about this earlier in the week right before I went into a meeting with a major retailer here in the US. They have a datacenter environment which includes a number of Sun Fire E25K servers running multiple Dynamic System Domains, some of which they have already moved to Solaris 10. During our discussion I asked their lead sys admin guy if they used Containers and he told me that all their infrastructure services were in the Solaris 10 domains and that everything running on Solaris 10 was Containerized. This isn't unusual among our customers nowadays so I asked him why and he answered with an even more succinct version of my standard verbiage on the topic "Why not?".

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I've just got back from a few days in Boston talking to customers about Solaris 10. It's something I never get tired of, even though I've been doing it for quite a while now.

As a product Solaris 10 has an incredible number of innovations that are unavailable in any other OS. At every presentation I do it's very rewarding to see even the die-hard skeptics in the room acknowledge the fact that we really have a very special product on our hands.

What makes it especially interesting, and keeps it fresh for me, is that it's only been available as a shipping product for about 5 months (over 1.6 million registered licenses and growing) and we've just begun to see it's true potential. Mike Shapiro and I were talking on Tuesday evening about what we were each going to present in Boston and he casually dropped some startling numbers into the conversation.

Based on a just completed Markov model of existing systems and Sun data, the Predictive Self-Healing functionality in Solaris 10 is delivering anything from a 42-52% reduction in annual interruption rate and a 32-46% reduction in annual downtime, depending on the sort of system it's running on. I'm sure Mike will be writing something about this soon so I won't go into any more detail but that is amazing.

And you can get it for free.

With the cost of downtime skyrocketing, that can add up to some significant savings.

We're not just giving Solaris away for free folks, we're practically allowing you to download big bags of cold hard cash.

Did I mention it's open too?

That's right, we can't get enough of giving things away for free, and as if yesterdays announcement wasn't enough, we're going to continue.

At JavaOne this year we plan to run a Solaris 10 performance challenge.

It's very simple, bring your Java apps to the Solaris 10 booth and we'll use Solaris 10 and DTrace to improve their performance. If you don't get a performance improvement, we'll give you a prize.

And we're not talking about stuffed animals, we're talking about cool gadgety prizes like iPods and iShuffles.

More details on booth location etc. as they become available.