Rebranding has begun for Sun products. One of note is the Solaris Operating System, which now reads as Oracle Solaris. This name change filters down to associated products such as Sun Studio, which now is officially called the Oracle Solaris Studio.

In regards to Oracle Solaris, Barbara Darrow with SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, identifies it as Oracle's new high-end data center appliances running the Oracle software stack. Oracle EnterpriseLinux now becomes the preferred OS for lower-end commodity hardware.

She cites Scott Jenkins, CEO of The EBS Group, an Oracle partner, as saying for the high end, Solaris is a no brainer to help Oracle compete with IBM in the datacenter. "Solaris has a lot of features for people using Sun hardware. They will more tightly integrate with Solaris and make that the enterprise play," he said.

The bifurcated OS strategy gives the vendor a play in two key but very different markets, Andy Kamlet, provost and senior vice president at Carnegie-Mellon University, a big Oracle shop, told Darrow.

"Fielding Solaris at the high end and Linux at the low end gives Oracle a way to play in the broad base while also having best-in-class offering. [It looks like the message is] keep Linux but run hard with Solaris -- it seemed clear from what Larry said [during the Jan. 27 teleconference outlining the company's Sun plans] that this is their strategy," said Kamlet.

Discussing the newly name Oracle Solaris Studio, Vijay Tatkar, who manages in the Oracle Solaris Studio and Cloud Computing group, blogged that even beyond the name change, there will be changes to Sun's set of compilers and tools geared towards easing application development of C, C++ and Fortran applications for the Solaris and Linux platforms. For one, support will obviously be moved to the Oracle model.

Tatkar takes the time to list and define Oracle Solaris Studio's value propositions, which include performance, productivity, parallelism, and platforms. He also identifies more unknown or unused aspects of the software like:

• a garbage collection library that can be used to keep memory allocations sane
• world-leading math libraries. Even the math lib in Linux (libm) is actually based on a free and open source form of a library that Sun had released more than a decade back, Tatkar reveals.
• runtime checking ("listen up, all IBM Rational Purify fans," he writes) that has been free in the product for 12+ years
• a static lock detection tool (lock lint) that has also been in the product for 12+ years and is popular among device driver writers ("in Solaris land, this tool has a variant called warlock," Tatkar notes)
• Oracle Solaris Studio compilers rarely change compatibility. "The last time they did was when Ansi C++ forced it by language change," he recalls, "and that the two options -compat=4 (for pre-ANSI) and -compat=5(default, ANSI behavior) are still in the compilers, more than 10 years later."
• basic linear algebra library (libsunperf), which he states is better than even Intel and AMD's specialized libraries on their own platform, besides working on Solaris and Linux, and both SPARC and x86
• an intervals arithmetic capability
• a GCC compatibility set of features that lets developers use most of the GCC constructs while exploiting all of Oracle Solaris Studio's features
• Performance Analyzer that does a large variety of application profile detection metrics ("more than I can enumerate even in a reasonable sized blog," Tatkar boasts) from timelines to caller/callee to source/disassembly to threads to Dataspace profiling to hardware counters

Plus, Sun works with the Cluster MPI community and releases its own version of Cluster (OpenMPI) library.

"And this is just a sample. With over 100 binaries and 200 library versions included, there is a lot of material that we can talk about," he writes, and plans to do as other changes are made during Sun's merger with Oracle.

More Information

Oracle Solaris Product Page

Oracle Solaris Studio Product Page

Sun Studio renamed - Tatkar's blog entry [...read more...]

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