Despite the fact that as of 9-22-06 Google officials have declined to comment, people are talking about the possibility that Google will adopt OpenSolarisTM and replace its Linux servers.

According to a report on Computerworld by Eric Lai, Google already uses "a 'significant amount' of Solaris in its data centers and is one of a number of customers 'excited about the possibility' of moving more Linux servers to AMD Opteron servers from Sun running some version of Solaris."

Lai cites many statistics about OpenSolaris and the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS) such as the 10 million users who have registered and downloaded Solaris 10 OS since it was made available in January 2005. But there are fewer people in the online OpenSolaris community than in the Linux community of OpenSUSE. Lai also discusses the progress of Sun creating a governing body for the OpenSolaris organization.

Examples of the success of Solaris OS include a quotation from a sys admin at Joyent, a company that recently switched to Solaris. "Some of our servers haven't been rebooted since we installed Solaris Express on them many months ago. They just sit there and make money." (Joyent's success story was covered in article number [16680] when they participated in the Try & Buy promotion Sun is offering.)

As we reported in June 2006:

• The OpenSolaris community has 14,000 members, with 29 user groups, 40 subcommunities and 31 active projects
• There have been four OpenSolaris source code distributions - NexentaOS, SchilliX, BeleniX, and mart-UX - with two more in the works
• In Brazil, China and India, OpenSolaris project events have been massively over-subscribed, with especially high interest among education establishments
• In May 2006, the OpenSolaris project received the prestigious SIIA Codie award for Best Open Source Solution

"The OpenSolaris community is growing in all directions at this point," says Jim Grisanzio, OpenSolaris community manager. People are starting projects, joining communities, engaging in discussions, creating distributions and ports, contributing code, and exploring opportunities. The passion is absolutely palpable."

Is this related to Google's interest in saving energy by calling on the industry to create a standard power supply for PCs? Google made a presentation at the Intel Developer Forum September 25, 2006, and says a shift from multi-voltage power supplies to a single 12 volt standard can save over $5 billion or 40 billion kilowatt hours over three years when PCs run eight hours a day. We'll keep our eye on the news. [...read more...]

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Other articles in the News section of Volume 103, Issue 4: Good News From Sun Marketing Identity Management Acquisition of Neogent Adds IAM Packages to Sun Offerings OpenSolaris to Find its Way into Google? (this article) Australia's Northern Territory Government Buys Sun Identity Management Solution See all archived articles in the News section.

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