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Free OS delivers Sun innovation in flexible new distribution model
More than three years after Sun opened the source code to the Solaris Operating System, OpenSolaris is ready for prime time.
 Barriers to adoption are lower. Installation and deployment is simplified. Image packages enable users to select and deploy only the functionality they want, while integrating with Solaris OS packages already in production. And OpenSolaris boasts enterprise-caliber features available only in the Solaris kernel.
Since the free OpenSolaris binary distribution debuted in May at Sun's CommunityOne event in San Francisco, thousands of developers and open source enthusiasts have visited the newly launched opensolaris.com Web site. Now with more than 100,000 members, the OpenSolaris community is growing faster than ever as Web 2.0 providers, enterprises, government agencies, and educational institutions develop and deploy on OpenSolaris.
The release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 meets growing user demand for a broader OS ecosystem encompassing Perl, Ruby, PHP, Python, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Apache, GlassFish, and other open source technologies, according to Dan Roberts, Sun director of OpenSolaris product marketing.
"opensolaris.org has been the place where people went to build the operating system, build the kernel," Roberts said. "As people continued going to opensolaris.org, they were looking for a distribution they could deploy and use."
"OpenSolaris delivers the best of both worlds — rapid delivery of innovation with a distribution model
that adopts and builds on the best parts of traditional open source delivery cycles, combined with the unique technologies and world-class support Sun's commercial Solaris 10 OS is known for," said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief OS strategist. Scheduled for release every six months, OpenSolaris marks a fundamental change in Sun's operating system strategy.
OpenSolaris, from Desktop to Datacenter
"Solaris 10 is absolutely the pinnacle of performance, scalability, and reliability — but the market is changing," Murdock said. "Solaris 10 has a top-down delivery mechanism, but there's a whole new model emerging with a bottom-up philosophy. What we're doing is adding a second delivery mechanism for Solaris technology, called OpenSolaris, with much shorter release cycles, much more agile development, and which is much easier to use."
With OpenSolaris, users get the powerful Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) observability and debugging framework, the industrial-strength Solaris ZFS, Solaris Containers technology for virtualization and consolidation, and other features that prompted InfoWorld to name the Solaris 10 OS as winner of the 2008 Technology of the Year Award for "Most Innovative Server OS."
"If you're familiar with Linux and you want to take advantage of capabilities like DTrace or ZFS, this is a way for you to do that," said Murdock, the founder of Debian Linux who joined Sun in 2007. "If you're a Ruby developer and Ruby is your whole world, what does it matter what operating system you're on? Well, if you have a capability like DTrace, the operating system does matter, and that's where we make a compelling case."
Some organizations didn't wait for the official OpenSolaris unveiling. Amazon, for instance, has industriously deployed OpenSolaris as part of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2. This Web service gives developers easy access to OpenSolaris in a pay-per-use virtual computing environment, and it helps validate OpenSolaris as a platform of choice for the network economy.
That's innovation, and innovation is what OpenSolaris is all about. It's helping to drive what Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz calls a "profound change" in the industry. "The traditional software industry, first revolutionized by open source, next by software as a service, is now embarking on a third revolutionary change... infrastructure as a service," Schwartz wrote in his popular blog.
Why such interest in OpenSolaris? What's in it for you and your organization? Here's a quick look at highlights of OpenSolaris 2008.05.
Simplified Installation and Manageability
OpenSolaris is available as a LiveCD image that boots into a live GNOME desktop and which may be freely redistributed. The release uses many GNU utilities, such as the "bash" interactive shell, which provides a more familiar user experience for those accustomed to a Linux or other GNU-based environment.
A new network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) simplifies and speeds integration with third-party applications. It can be used to create packages and OpenSolaris repositories and publish packages to the repositories. IPS enables users to select only the packages they want, with greater accuracy and control of applications, automated dependencies resolution, and full integration with existing Solaris packages they may already be using.
"When you get the commercial Solaris 10 OS today, you get a monolithic distribution," Roberts said. "If I'm a developer who, for instance, just wants to deploy a PHP application on Apache, there's a lot in Solaris 10 that's not necessarily useful to me. IPS offers greater flexibility and manageability."
The new OpenSolaris is also better suited for installation on laptops and desktops, with a next-generation installer and the GNOME desktop, rather than the older windows systems and command lines in the Solaris 10 OS. The installation experience is "painless, intuitive, and easily on par with Ubuntu and Fedora," as Ryan Paul said in a review at media outlet Ars Technica.
ZFS for Roll-Back Protection and Storage
OpenSolaris and IPS use the 128-fit ZFS as the root file system to supply instant roll-back and check-summing capabilities that in effect give developers a big "Undo" button. If code is accidentally deleted, for instance, ZFS makes it easy for the user to return to the previous state. This avoids the problematic and time-consuming troubleshooting and reverse engineering often required if an upgrade goes awry.
"By building on top of ZFS, we have the capability to roll back to a previous state if an upgrade goes wrong," Murdock said. "That gives developers the freedom and flexibility to test ideas without worrying about digging themselves a hole."
Named by InfoWorld for a 2008 Technology of the Year Award for "Best File System," ZFS offers a compelling platform for storage and is backed by a growing OpenSolaris storage community. One early ZFS storage adopter is Nexenta, an OpenSolaris community member that leverages OpenSolaris OS and ZFS in its NexentaStor NAS appliance to help supply flexible snapshots, retention policies, and compression. "The shift to open storage solutions is now," said Nexenta CEO Even Powell. "As a participating member of the OpenSolaris community since 2006, we've leveraged the strengths of the Solaris kernel and the innovation provided by ZFS."
Powerful Enterprise Functionality
With OpenSolaris, users can take full advantage of technologies that have earned the Solaris 10 OS its reputation for innovation. For instance, DTrace lets users tune applications for performance and safely troubleshoot production environments with little or no performance impact.
Solaris Containers enables virtualization by isolating applications and services with software-defined boundaries and allows private execution environments to be created within a single OpenSolaris instance. ZFS greatly reduces file system administration burdens, automatically repairs corrupted data, and executes read/write operations at breathtaking speed. Learn more about these and other features:
Sun Expert Support Tailored to Your Needs
Sun offers OpenSolaris service and support to help improve your productivity by spending more time on critical projects and less on fixing problems. Sun's OpenSolaris subscription support features a unique combination of telephone and online technical support, automatic notification of package updates, and bug escalation to Sun engineers. Two support levels offer flexibility to meet your needs.
In addition, OpenSolaris Developer Expert Assistance offers developers online support to assist with technical assistance for code support, programming questions, diagnostic advice, and how-to and best practice guidance. A standard annual subscription plan covers unlimited incidents for OpenSolaris.
OpenSolaris is ready now, combining innovation from Sun and thousands of developers around the world. With OpenSolaris, the only limit is your imagination.
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