INDUSTRY

During its quarterly Network Computer '04 launch today, Sun Microsystems, Inc. began the final countdown to the Solaris 10 Operating System launch by announcing technologies, developer tools and training programs targeted at accelerating migration to Sun's next-generation OS. With Sun's advanced tools, customers can achieve performance improvements of up to 40 percent over those built with Sun Studio 8, and up to 60 percent higher performance when built for AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor-based systems. Scheduled for release later this year, the Solaris 10 OS is the cornerstone of Sun's high performance network computing offerings. Installations of the product as part of Sun's Software Express (SM) for Solaris program have now reached more than a half million, and ongoing customer previews of the Solaris 10 OS show that Sun is delivering on developers' expectations for enhanced availability, system utilization, security and performance in the datacenter. Sun is now rallying new Solaris 10 online communities and extensive partner support and training to pave the way to Solaris 10 for independent software and hardware vendors (ISVs and IHVs). Sun also kicked off the Solaris Developer Challenge, under which developers will be given awards for the most creative and successful uses of the Solaris 10 OS. Details of the award program and entry forms are available at http://www.sun.com/solaris-challenge . "Reaching the half million mark with Software Express is a huge milestone," said John Loiacono, executive vice president, Software at Sun. "With so many customers and partners now test driving the Solaris 10 OS, we are committed to delivering the programs, services and resources they need to ensure a smooth and successful transition into production environments once we flip the switch on the final release." Over the next 90 days, Sun will release a number of new technologies, migration tools and support programs on the road to the Solaris 10 OS. These include: -- Sun Studio 10 software, expected to be launched with Solaris 10 in the coming quarter, is expanded to meet the developer's demanding performance needs for Solaris on AMD Opteron and Intel Nocona processor-based systems running 64-bit applications. In addition, Sun Studio 9 today supports Solaris 10 with all of the performance advantages over open source alternatives -- nearly 60 percent faster. -- Integration of the Java(TM) 2 Platform, Standard Edition 5 (J2SE 5), (code named Project Tiger) the most significant upgrade to the Java platform and programming language since its initial release nearly one decade ago. J2SE 5 will be generally available in the next 30 days. -- The iForce(SM) Partner Program/Solaris 10 Early Adoption Program offers ISVs, IHVs and development partners the opportunity to adopt the newest Solaris features and technologies. More than 120 of the most popular business application software partners have begun preparing and testing their applications to support the Solaris 10 OS. Additional information regarding the Solaris 10 Early Adoption Program is available at: http://iforce.sun.com/partners/solaris . -- The Solaris 10 OS Early Advantage Training Program offers instructor-led classes for system and network administrators and Solaris developers. A free web-based mini-course is also available. For more information on Solaris 10 training and certification, visit http://training.sun.com/US/solaris10.html . -- Enhancements to Sun(TM) Cluster 3 software to help reduce the cost and complexity of managing mission critical applications. Developer Tools Accelerate Move to Solaris 10 Customers are already demanding a wide range of applications on the Solaris 10 OS. To help accelerate enterprise deployment on all platforms, Sun has created the Solaris 10 Developer Collection, a complete technology information, community and support program hosted by the Sun Developer Network. The Solaris 10 Developer Collection has an extensive list of developer guides, software downloads, documentation and forums that address a wide variety of Solaris 10 development topics such as application development, device drivers and an updated JDK for the Solaris OS. Tools supporting the Solaris 10 OS are being readied, including the next edition of the Sun Studio compiler for application debugging and tuning. Details about the Solaris 10 Developer Collection are available at http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/products/sol10.html . "Sun Studio tools continue to improve the performance of our applications for the Solaris platform and productivity for our C-based development environment," said Clarke Thacher, senior software manager, UNIX platforms at SAS. "We find the debugging and performance analysis capabilities to be world-class and the tools to be an invaluable asset in our aggressive product release cycles. Additionally, through participation in Sun's Tunathon program, we have direct access to the Sun Studio product engineering teams to our mutual benefit with Sun providing us expert feedback on application performance hotspots." High Availability and Uptime in the Datacenter Sun Cluster software is integrated with the Solaris OS, enabling customers to deploy mission-critical, high availability solutions with faster failure detection and recovery. New enhancements include improved manageability, greater deployment flexibility and scalability. Sun is also announcing the Sun Cluster Oracle RAC SVM Edition, which is integrated with the Solaris Volume Manager. This software delivers a complete Sun solution for Oracle9i RAC deployments, enabling significantly higher availability with reduced cost.