November 23, 2007

Dell announced last week that it would sell and support servers with Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system. This type of alliance between Dell and Sun will expand hardware choices for Solaris and the buyer.

June 14, 2005

Sun Microsystems today released the Solaris operating system as open-source software. The company has published source code to the kernel on the OpenSolaris web site, and will be publishing other code over the next few months. The move is seen as critical in competing with Linux and Windows for the hearts and minds of developers and users. OpenSolaris is being released under the Community Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which means that programmers are able to use code from the operating system in other open source and commercial software projects.

June 4, 2005

According to several analysts, Sun's purchase of StorageTek is like "two garbage trucks colliding" and a "marriage of losers". The claim is that Sun is overpaying for a business with zero revenue growth. Others are complaining that the deal has a huge gap, namely the lack of a tape encryption solution, a critical issue in today's corporate world.

May 19, 2005

In what looks like the start of a major operating system war, IBM and Red Hat have joined forces to battle Sun and its Solaris OS. IBM and Red Hat are offering free evaluation services for migrating Solaris applications to Red Hat. Meanwhile, Sun is calling the move "an act of desperation".

April 25, 2005

Dan Price, a Solaris developer at Sun, has announced that Solaris Express 4/05 has shipped. The update contains about 200 bug fixes, as well as some new features including: X.org 6.8.2, 25% better single-threaded standard I/O performance, cache enhancements for Opteron servers, DTrace support for Java debugging, tunable TCP keepalive probing, 10 gigabit Ethernet driver enhancements, SunVTS updates, and more.

April 22, 2005

ZDNet UK has published a short review of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. New features in Solaris 10 include better performance, a new fast TCP/IP stack, the new ZFS file system, enhanced security, enhanced role based access control, virtualization using containers, predictive self healing, advanced debugging using DTrace, native execution of Linux binaries, and more. Overall the review is positive, but barely, since the reviewer did find a number of installation and other problems when using the Solaris 10 on non-Sun hardware.

April 15, 2005

Both IBM and Sun Microsystems released disappointing earnings yesterday. IBM's first-quarter revenue and profit rose just 3 percent, lower than financial targets and Wall Street estimates. Meanwhile, Sun reported lower revenues and a deeper net loss.

April 11, 2005

Specifications for next-generation Galaxy servers from Sun appeared briefly on Sun's web site before being removed. According to the IDG News Service, the servers are based on the AMD Opteron processors. Two low-end and two high-end models will be available. The two low-end models will be dual CPU machines with 16 GB of RAM, however one model will be a 1U box with two hard drives and two PCI-X slots, while the other will be a 2U box with four hard drives and five PCI-X slots. The two high-end models will both be 4U boxes with four hard drives, one model will be an eight processor machine with 64 GB of RAM with six PCI-X slots, while the other will be a four processor machine with 32 GB of RAM and six PCI-X slots.

April 8, 2005

An article over at Sun's BigAdmin site takes an in-depth look at Solaris Zones partitioning and virtualization technology. Learn about the benefits of zones, the limitations of zones, zone creation and management, zone security, zone resource and service allocation, zone device management, and more.

April 8, 2005

Red Hat has scored a couple of significant victories in Europe this week. First it has been selected for a 8,500 seat Red Hat Linux desktop deployment at LVM, a major German insurance company. Secondly, it signed an 8,000 seat desktop deployment deal at BPU Banca, Italy's seventh largest bank. The BPU deployment is also a loss for Sun, because Red Hat is replacing 8,000 Solaris desktops. BPU is claiming that they will save 50% by dropping Solaris and using Red Hat instead.

March 30, 2005

According to the most recent statement by Sun Microsystems president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz, the company will likely make the Java Enterprise System available as open source. The official announcement may come in the next month or two.

March 22, 2005

On April 5th, Sun Microsystems will cut off free access to a number of online resources. Only individuals and companies with Sun support contracts will be allowed to get this information. This includes access to the SunSolve Knowledgebase, and many sections of the online Sun System Handbook. This is a major blow to small businesses, hobbyists, and other buyers of older Sun hardware.

March 9, 2005

A lengthy article at Sun's BigAdmin portal talks about the Least Privilege Model in Solaris 10. This security feature allows processes to have highly granular root privileges, thus giving some programs certain root privileges but not others, thus greatly enhancing system security. System administration also becomes easier because users can be allowed to safely perform certain administrative tasks without having full root access.

March 4, 2005

NetworkWorld put Solaris 10 up against RHEL 4 in several transaction and network performance benchmarks, in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes. The results show that in 32-bit mode, RHEL is the winner, but in 64-bit mode, Solaris is the winner. The article also talks about the various administrative features of both operating systems.

February 25, 2005

MadPenguin.org has reviewed Solaris 10, with additional focus on features like DTrace, Zones, SMF, and the new FireEngine TCP/IP stack.

February 22, 2005

AnandTech takes a serious look at the Sun Fire V40z, a quad Opteron server in a 3U chassis. This machine is a database demon, with all the performance and redundancy one could ever want, and may very well be the best Linux server hardware on the market today.

February 19, 2005

At LinuxWorld this week Sun showed off Java Desktop 3.0. Aimed at the corporate desktop environment, the operating system includes the Linux 2.6 kernel as well as additional Windows interoperability features. These include Samba 3.0 and Exchange integration for the Evolution client.