ACADEMIA

Sun developers, system administrators and customers embrace thriving open source business model and deliver innovative new contributions to Solaris 10 through the OpenSolaris community -- Sun Microsystems today announced that in the one year since the award-winning OpenSolaris community went live, it has experienced tremendous growth in the open source community and customer adoption. Since open sourcing the Solaris Operating System (OS) in June 2005, Sun has seen the OpenSolaris community grow to more than 14,000 members while Solaris 10 has exceeded 5 million registered license shipments - more than its competitors have shipped collectively in the last 18 months, and more than all current Solaris OS versions combined. "Since open sourcing the Solaris OS last year, we have exceeded our business and adoption growth targets year-over-year. Over 85 percent of the Fortune 500 have the Solaris 10 OS in development or production," said Rich Green, executive vice president of Software at Sun Microsystems. "This tremendous growth is a direct result of our three part strategy to invest in and deliver the most advanced operating system on the planet, adopt a new Software as a Service business model and reinvigorate the Sun developer community with free and open source software." The OpenSolaris community has accomplished many milestones in its first year with over 14,000 members, 29 user groups around the world, 40 communities, 27 active projects and more than 100 putbacks. Sun has been working with customers across a variety of industries to solve their business problems by delivering a combination of some of the best open source and enterprise technologies supported by Sun. Key OpenSolaris customers include Joyent, the creator of the Team Computer concept, who has built applications, tools and unique on-demand service and hardware solutions on OpenSolaris and Solaris ZFS. To access a list of OpenSolaris contributors visit: its Web site. To learn more about OpenSolaris, visit: its Web site. To join the community, visit its Web site. The Solaris 10 OS continues to attract new customers, including: - Twenty First Century Communications, a privately-held telecommunications ASP, leveraged the Solaris 10 OS and Sun's Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers to drive substantial savings and deliver a wide-variety of client-facing applications in Canada, the UK and the US. - The University of Ulm in Germany is leveraging the Solaris 10 OS and Solaris ZFS to migrate their home directories. Solaris ZFS is designed to reduce the amount of time it takes to re-sync mirrors for their mail or cache directories from 8 or more hours, to only 20 minutes when the file systems are not so full. - Parago, a promotional management company focused on innovative Customer Lifecycle Marketing solutions, has been testing Solaris ZFS with their database technology. Parago has found that Solaris ZFS can be leveraged to reduce storage administration overhead and optimize space utilization which therefore makes it a great complement to a database platform. - Tellme Networks combines open standards and voice recognition to operate the world's largest voice and data application network for the phone. Tellme relies on the unique combination of speed, scalability and reliability of the Solaris 10 OS to process the billions of calls its network receives every year. The Solaris 10 OS' "out of the box" multithreading performance, combined with the Dynamic Tracing framework (DTrace) have enabled Tellme to maximize systems efficiency and performance in rapid time. The fine grained access and observability of DTrace, on both x86 and SPARC processor-based systems, allows Tellme to focus on creating new and innovative solutions. Running the Solaris OS underscores Tellme's commitment to using open standards to change the way people use the phone everyday. Sun also announced availability today of the next update to the Solaris 10 OS, Solaris 10 6/06, that has been enhanced with new features developed in both the OpenSolaris and wider open source communities. Key features include Solaris ZFS 1.0, a revolutionary new file system that can provide one of the highest levels of data integrity and security, as well as PostgreSQL for Solaris, Predictive Self-Healing for x86 and x64 servers equipped with the AMD Opteron processor and new high-performance networking functionality. These advanced features enhance the already powerful Solaris 10 OS, which is guaranteed to run thousands of existing Solaris applications on over 650 x64/x86 platforms and on over 100 SPARC platforms. This industry leading combination of OS features, applications and supported platforms has resulted in a product which has delivered over 100 world-record performance benchmarks and is available from over 40 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Sun also announced that it will offer Software Service Plans to support customers who are using the PostgreSQL open source database on Solaris 10. For more information, please go to: its Web site. Customers interested in downloading the Solaris 10 OS can also get access to the Solaris Enterprise System which contains the Sun Java Enterprise System (Java ES), Sun N1 System Manager software and Sun Studio software developer tools at no cost for both development and deployment. All of this software makes the Solaris Enterprise System the only comprehensive and open infrastructure software platform available today, and is the only enterprise alternative to Microsoft. For more information on the Solaris Enterprise System, including a comprehensive and detailed list of new Solaris OS features and functionality, please visit: its Web site.