In an interview with Jim McHugh, vice president of software infrastructure marketing, Sun Microsystems, the VP describes the state of Solaris in today’s marketplace to Paul Krill, ComputerWorld.com.

Solaris, Sun’s Unix platform, maintains it has the technological advantages and accommodations for open source to keep Solaris in the game versus Linux. Sun also cites important customer wins as evidence of the platform's continued strength. According to McHugh, Linux has made some momentum. For example, "Glasses Direct in the UK switched to Solaris because they found that they were relying upon Apache and that ran 450 percent faster on Solaris than on Linux."

Examples of the main advantages of Solaris over Windows and other Unix platforms are the following: Predictive Self-Healing (with this feature "We've looked at different components that were 30 percent higher availability."); Solaris Security ("having the highest-level security in any OS"); and its data management system (scalability and snapshot features).

In addition, "If you look at the number of licenses of Solaris 10," said McHugh, "was about 13 million, and one thing that is really important to remember, Solaris actually has more deployments than any other Unix or Linux distribution. And we also have more applications running on Solaris than there are on any Linux distribution."

Sun has been making progress with the OpenSolaris open source effort and has had a lot of opportunity to expand the market for OpenSolaris. The number of downloads that are taking place continues to climb and the number of active users continues to grow. Recently Sun put out a CD to students and professors on OpenSolaris from which they are receiving feedback.

Sun offers OpenSolaris, which is an open source version, and Solaris 10, the commercial version, for which it offers long-term support. "OpenSolaris we're releasing every six months," said McHugh, "constantly adding the latest features, constantly having the latest components from the other open source communities such as Gnome, keeping up to date with the latest features from that standpoint." He explains that with OpenSolaris, companies that are building applications have the ability to experiment, try out, and run the complete latest versions in operating systems that will give them an advantage as they roll out their Web 2.0 applications.

Coming up at the end of October is Sun’s update 6 for Solaris 10 and updates for OpenSolaris in November.

"If you look at the innovation that's coming in Solaris, I would say it continues to go really strong,” said McHugh. "Because of its commitment and its maturity as an operating system, we're able to guarantee things like binary compatibility." McHugh discussed Solaris versus Linux, accenting that Solaris’ focus, "Whereas because of our strength of the maturity, we are able to not put that burden on our customers," said McHugh.

Computer World Interview with Jim McHugh

Solaris 10

OpenSolaris.com [...read more...]

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