Sun tailors Solaris package to multicore development
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(InfoWorld) - Sun is sprucing up Solaris Express Developer Edition, which features the Solaris OS bundled with tools, by supporting enhanced application development for multicore processors. The company is unveiling on Tuesday the 5/07 edition of the package, which features also includes Sun Studio 12, for parallelizing C, C++, and Fortran applications. Sun Studio 12, Sun said, features a distribution of Solaris based on OpenSolaris, the open-source variant of Solaris. Also included in the package is support for building multicore SPARC and x86-based processors. Solaris Express also supports Java development, which features its own multi-threaded development model. "The main intent [of Solaris Express Developer Edition] is to make it very easy for developers to get started building applications for Solaris," through provision of a single install, drivers, and tools, said Dan Roberts, director of Solaris and OpenSolaris marketing. Also in this version, Sun is offering a Gnome-based desktop, including Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and an update to the StarOffice 8 office application suite. The NetBeans 5.5 IDE is featured for developing desktop, Web, and Java applications. The version of Solaris featured in the package is based on the Nevada 64a build, which purports to look like the next major release of Solaris, referred to as Solaris 11. Included are desktop enhancements, bug fixes, upgrades, and updates. Gnome is the desktop manager in the build. Also included is automatic network configuration, in which the OS makes default choices. Wireless drivers in the new version of Solaris Express Developer Edition support wireless networking when installing this version of Solaris on laptops, Sun said. Solaris Express Developer Edition is available free for download here. Sun sells support services with per-incident costs starting at $49.
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(InfoWorld) - The key to Sun's success going forward is increased adoption of its Solaris 10 operating system, company CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Tuesday. Sun had 7 million free downloads of Solaris in recent months, and 70 percent of those downloading it have non-Sun hardware in their IT infrastructure, Schwartz said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week in San Francisco. If IT people are running Solaris on hardware from IBM, HP, and Dell, they can be sold Sun hardware to replace those other brands. "If your OS is in front of a customer, you're now given permission to sell everything you've got in your portfolio," Schwartz said. Sun's servers and storage appliances are optimized to run on Solaris, though they can also run on the Linux OS. Sun is approaching the first anniversary ofÂ a restructuring planÂ announced by Schwartz after he took over from Scott McNealy, who remains chairman. Sun has eliminated 4,000 jobs at the company over the last year to reduce costs and there may be more workforce reductions ahead, but only through attrition, Schwartz said. The company currently has about 38,000 employees worldwide. Sun has an opportunity to grow as data centers continue to evolve, Schwartz said. Already, the number of rack-mounted servers has surpassed the number of tower servers sold, and blade servers are on track to outsell rack servers as data centers continue to consolidate. "Why do we even bother with racks?" Schwartz asked during an interview before a roomful of analysts. "Racks are optimized for people to interact with infrastructure. But if you talk to any IT administrator, the last thing they want in their data center is a person because they try to be helpful, but they bend pins and kick plugs and do all kinds of bad things. "The long-term evolution of this marketplace will see data centers emerge in a standardized form factor at large scale," he said. Sun is planning to serve that market with its Project Blackbox, a data center that is installed in a 20-foot shipping container, delivered to a customer and operated from the container. It is scheduled to begin shipping later this year. In its first profitable quarter in more than a year, Sun posted net income of $126 million, or $0.03 per share, on a 7 percent gain in revenue to $3.56 billion, in its fiscal 2007 second quarter, which ended Dec. 31, 2006. Analysts, including those at firms besides Morgan Stanley, forecast Sun to earn $0.01 a share in the current quarter on $3.42 billion in revenue. For fiscal 2007, they estimate Sun will earn $0.10 a share on revenue of $14.88 billion, according to an average of analyst estimates from Thomson Financial. In recent months, Sun has begun again to use Intel chips in its hardware. Sun also announced a $700 million investment in the company by KKR Private Equity Investors, the publicly traded fund of the private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. KKR will also nominate a director to Sun's board. KKR's investment will provide Sun the opportunity to market to all the other firms in which KKR invests, Schwartz said. Â
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Sun Java Workstations are designed to support simultaneous 32-bit and 64-bit computing with no compromises in performance, allowing users to maintain their existing x86 infrastructure
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Sun Microsystems Inc. SUNW.O on  Sunday introduced the long-awaited next version of its  operating system, Solaris 10, which the network computer maker  is betting on to help bring itself back to sustained  profitability.
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InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems is sprucing up its Solaris 10 operating system with security and virtualization improvements.
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With Sun Microsystems set to detail its plans for Solaris 10 on Monday, Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz spoke with Computerworld about what the company has up its open-source sleeve.
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Sun Microsystems on Tuesday unveiled Version 7 of the companyâs enterprise development tool suite, Sun Java Studio Enterprise, and previewed a JVM that will support 64-bit AMD Opteron processors.
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Paul Jones, developer of the Solar Application Framework, has posted the latest version of said software. Details for the release can be found in this blog posting over on his site.    Last night, I released version 0.24.0 of Solar, the simple object library and application repository. Solar is a PHP 5 framework for rapid application development.   You can read the change notes for a full run-down, but there are a few changes in particular that I want to highlight.    He points out changes in the form of two major packages:  Solar_Request - a new class developed to handle the request information for a script (get/post/cookie/etc) Solar_Session - a new class to handle the sessions in an application, complete with read-once "flash" support  He also mentions a small change to the built-in Ajax support for the handling of the "edit" view.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Sun Microsystems Inc. last week quietly released a version of its Java Desktop System (JDS) software based on the Solaris x86 operating system, a move the company is calling the first step in a long-term strategy to unify the user interface for Sun's Linux and Solaris products, Sun officials said Thursday.
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Sun Microsystems launched the much-anticipated new version of its Solaris operating system this week, and announced an overhauled pricing model designed to compete with Linux.
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Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), as expected, has released the source code for its flagship Solaris 10 server operating system and also has moved the company's DTrace technology into the open source realm, along with a number of technology patents.
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Analysis: To promote the popularity of its Solaris operating system, Sun must entice developers and mend rifts.
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Switch blade Sun Microsystems has introduced the Sun Blade 6000 Modular System, which offers a choice of blades powered by the UltraSPARC T1 processor with CoolThreads technology, Intel Xeon processors, or AMD Opteron processors and supports Solaris, Windows, and Linux operating systems.â¦
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SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- Executives from Sun Microsystems Inc. outlined their response to the growing popularity of Linux, speaking at the launch on Monday of the most significant update of the Solaris operating system in over two years. Key to the effort is a plan to release Solaris under an open source license with a new subscription pricing model, as well as a software updating system similar to those used by Linux vendors Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc.ADVERTISEMENTSolaris 10(TM) OS: Position your business ten moves ahead.Solaris 10 OS has arrived and provides even more reasons for the world's most demanding businesses to operate on this, the leading UNIX platform. Like the fact you can run Linux and Solaris applications side-by-side and run the same OS on SPARC(R), AMD Opteron(TM), and Intel processor-based systems. Discover more reasons and how Solaris 10 OS can move your business ahead today.
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Dean McCarron of Mercury Research said console designers are focusing on multicore, multi-threading technology that can allow multiple programs to run efficiently at the same time.
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Sun's 'Project Indiana' will revamp Solaris to lure open-source developers.
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(InfoWorld) - With an incremental update to its Solaris 10 OS, Sun is extending the platform's virtualization capabilities to accommodate Linux and Solaris on the same computer. Sun will add to the Solaris Containers capability, which has bolstered server usage by allowing for multiple instances of Solaris on the same server, said Dan Roberts, Sun director of marketing for Solaris. With Solaris 10 8/07, being announced Tuesday, users can run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS Linux, and Linux applications via Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. "You can now consolidate your Solaris and Linux apps onto one chassis," Roberts said. Solaris Containers debuted in Solaris 10 two-and a half years ago. Virtualization, Roberts noted, has become a popular way to get more out of servers that had been running commonly at only a 10- to 15-percent utilization rate. Because Red Hat and CentOS are only supported on Intel x86 systems, the new Solaris Containers for Linux capability is only supported on that hardware. Customer demand will dictate whether this functionality is extended to other Linux distributions. Sun's accommodation for Linux helps Solaris in its battle for users with Linux, said analyst Richard Jones, vice president at Burton Group. "I see this as a way for [Solaris] to definitely continue to survive in the market because they're now allowing for a greater level of interoperability with Linux," Jones said. The move expands the number of applications and services that could run in a Solaris environment, said Jones.Â  Sun, naturally, sees Solaris as superior to Linux. "You would want to go with this over Linux because you want the most reliable, most secure operating system," as well as features like Solaris Containers, said Roberts. Sun views the upgrade as making it easier to migrate to Solaris. Also with version 8/07, Solaris can be used to manage resources within a container at a finer grain level. "For example, you can now define how much memory or CPU you want a particular app or container to use," said Roberts. This prevents one container from overwhelming an entire system. Users can assure that high-priority applications get the CPU cycles needed. Sun will include separate IP stacks for each container with Solaris 10 8/07 to enable administrators to know how much network bandwidth is being consumed by a container. Determinations could be made on whether to move an application to another server. A Large Send Offload feature reduces CPU workload by offloading networking processing operations to a network interface card. Jumbo Frames support in the 8/07 release means the OS supports very large network packages beyond the 1,500 bytes limit specified in Ethernet. This is useful for applications shipping high volumes of data. Version 8/07 will include a copy of the open-source PostgreSQL 8.2 database, a high-capacity transactional system with performance enhancements for Solaris and support for DTrace probes. These probes provide the ability to observe application performance. Users theoretically could replace an Oracle database with PostgreSQL 8.2 "We fundamentally believe Solaris is the best OS for running databases," Roberts said. Solaris 10 8/07 does not include any technologies from Project Indiana, which is Sun's project to make Solaris more palatable to Linux users by adding capabilities like distribution of Solaris binaries. The project is part of the OpenSolaris effort, which offers Solaris in an open source format. Sun's Solaris is a commercial distribution of the platform.