By Leslie O'Neill

June 27, 2007 -- Today, Sun announces the open sourcing of Solaris Cluster, an integrated software platform that provides high availability clustering and disaster recovery to key business applications. Called Open High Availability (HA) Cluster, the open sourced code will be made available to developers in three phases through a new HA Clusters community on OpenSolaris.org.

With Open HA Cluster, Sun provides community members with a solid technology base to support innovation on cluster and high availability systems. Donating this cluster code to the OpenSolaris Project further cements Sun's position as the top contributor of code to the open source software community.[1]

It will take Sun about 18 months to finish open sourcing the Open HA Cluster software. It will be released in three phases over that time period.

Initial HA Cluster Contributions

In phase one, Sun is contributing the application modules, also called agents, that enable commercial or open source applications to become highly available in a cluster framework. Using the Open HA Cluster source code open source developers can more build and deploy highly available application services. Specifically, developers can:

• Write new HA agents for custom applications.
• Adapt existing agents to better meet their specific high-availability needs. For example, a developer could instruct an application's agent to use the cluster's monitoring facilities, but still retain manual control over the recovery process.
• Leverage advanced monitoring features.
• Improve integration with Solaris Containers and clustering thanks to the Solaris Containers agent.
• Better understand the behavior of Solaris Cluster agents for faster diagnostics and corrective actions.

Once the agents are written using the Open HA Cluster source code, a company's custom application is cluster-enabled. It can then be run on one of two environments: either Solaris Cluster 3.2 with Solaris or a completely open source-based environment of a Cluster Express binary (to be released in July through the HA Cluster community) running on Solaris Express based on OpenSolaris.

In the first phase, Sun is delivering the code for twenty-four of the HA agents that ship with Solaris Cluster. They are:

In addition to the code, Sun is also releasing the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) suites. Developers can use these to test newly written agents, and agent-related documentation.

Upcoming HA Cluster Contributions

Planned for December, phase two will deliver the code for the newly-released Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition, which enables multi-site disaster recovery. It manages the availability of application services and data across clusters dispersed in different locations around the world.

And in phase three, which is planned for the end of 2008, Sun will deliver the code for the core Solaris Cluster infrastructure, also with SCATE tests and documentation. By the end of phase three, open source developers will be able to build a complete cluster environment with Open HA Cluster and make all of their applications highly available.

Open Source Stack

In addition to being the largest contributor of free software, Sun is the only company that offers an open-source stack – from the processor to the operating system to the application layer. By open sourcing its software stack, Sun gives control to developers and customers, who can mix and match alternative operating systems, middleware, and applications on industry-standard hardware. Sun's approach keeps customers from being locked into proprietary systems. There's no risk or long-term commitment required when using open source software, and customers can participate at the level that suits them best.

Get Started

Sun is building a new community on OpenSolaris.org called HA Clusters for developers who need to make applications and platforms highly available, system administrators who are implementing Solaris and clustering technology in datacenters, university students and teachers who are researching HA, and new users exploring the technology. Get started today.