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