Sun's Operating System Strategy -- Choose the Right Platform for the Right Job

Today's economic challenges are forcing businesses to rethink the creation, management, extension, and ultimate delivery of information technology services with greater functionality at lower costs. Pressure to deliver bottom-line results is leading businesses to look for new ways to drive costs out of their operations. Computing infrastructures must scale horizontally and vertically across numerous heterogeneous servers to add capacity as needed and provide continued service availability -- all with the security necessary to protect businesses and information from intrusions and virus threats. Managing the complexity of increasing IT demands requires flexible networks that can adapt to evolving business needs.

By building on a straightforward, open, secure, available computing platform that can be optimized at the right cost, customers have a solid foundation for adapting to what lies ahead. For more than 20 years, Sun's strategy has been based on open systems, and nowhere is this more evident than in its operating system technologies and applications support. Sun offers two open operating environments -- the Solaris Operating System and branded Linux distributions from Sun -- giving companies the freedom to choose the right platform for the right job.

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Key Feature Highlights

Key Benefit Highlights

The Solaris Operating System

The cornerstone of Sun's system offerings is the enterprise-class Solaris Operating System (OS), the #1 UNIX environment. The Solaris OS provides leading innovation with proven scalability, availability, performance, and security on SPARC, AMD Opteron, and Intel Xeon-based systems. Companies can depend on the stable, high-quality Solaris foundation to develop, deliver, and manage business-critical and mission-critical services with the peace of mind that the OS is fully indemnified, and that Solaris certified applications are guaranteed to run on all new Solaris releases. The Solaris 10 OS -- the latest release of the premier operating system -- reduces the complexity, costs, and risks associated with today's diverse computing environments through a number of new technologies. With over 600 new breakthrough features, including Predictive Self-Healing and Dynamic Tracing capabilities, Solaris ZFS (zettabyte file system) management, Solaris Containers (formerly N1 Grid Containers) technology, and more, the Solaris 10 OS gives organizations the tools and technologies to quickly and confidently create powerful computing infrastructures. In fact, the Solaris 10 OS even integrates the most popular open source packages and applications, including Apache, Tomcat, Samba, and Secure Shell. Many open source applications are provided, compiled, tested, and ready to run on the Solaris platform, reducing time to deployment.

The only industrial-grade UNIX environment available for both SPARC and x86 platforms, the Solaris OS uses a single source code tree to deliver the same 32- and 64-bit enterprise- class functionality across SPARC, AMD Opteron, and Intel Xeon-based systems. With the industry's only Application Compatibility Guarantee, massive scalability, and over 11,000 Sun and third-party applications, the Solaris 10 OS lets businesses standardize on a single operating system that runs on a wide variety of hardware -- from entry-level x86- based systems to mainframe-class servers -- from Sun and third-party vendors.

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Linux from Sun

Linux has taken hold as enterprises have embraced open computing solutions. Companies that have standardized on Linux or native Linux applications, or who want to draw on the resources of the open source community, can take advantage of Sun's complete commercial Linux solutions -- all supported by Sun's world-class services. Offering branded Linux distributions from Red Hat or SUSE that run on a wide range of Sun and third-party hardware, Sun provides companies with OS choice to select the right platform for their business needs.

Sun further delivers full Solaris and Linux interoperability, including binary and source code compatibility, in addition to common applications and portability features in Java technology as well as common developer tools. A new feature of the Solaris 10 OS enables Linux applications to run unmodified and without recompilation, enabling businesses to capitalize on Solaris 10 innovations without sacrificing existing Linux applications.

Microsoft Windows Interoperability

To broaden availability of the Solaris OS and Linux from Sun across IT infrastructures, Sun is working with Microsoft to provide Java support on Microsoft Windows, facilitate Microsoft Windows certification for Sun hardware, and foster Java technology and .NET collaboration, ensuring interoperability right out of the box.

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Customer Benefits

The Solaris 10 OS provides integrated services, significantly reducing operating costs. The Sun Java Enterprise System gives organizations the enterprise software they need directly integrated with the Solaris 10 OS and with their Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms. This provides an innovative business model that reduces acquisition, integration, and support costs. The Solaris 10 OS provides greatly improved system availability and utilization, enabling access to more system resources and fostering the consolidation of applications onto a single server, reducing costs. In fact, breakthrough functionality lets the Solaris 10 OS provide up to 80 percent system utilization and up to 30X performance improvement at prices that are lower than competitive offerings. For example, businesses can spend up to 11 times less to acquire the Solaris 10 OS than they do for Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

The Solaris 10 OS combines industry-leading security, binary compatibility, and source code compatibility to provide a risk-free environment for growing businesses on SPARC, AMD Opteron, and Intel Xeon-based platforms. Interoperability with Linux supports even more compatibility, ensuring that existing Linux and open source applications run on the Solaris OS, or are extremely simple to compile.

Solaris applications run on the entire Sun product family, from entry-level servers to powerful multiprocessor systems, and Linux applications run on the Solaris OS unmodified. The only commercially available operating system with self-managing and selfhealing capabilities, and a self-tuning Solaris ZFS, the Solaris 10 OS helps reduce the amount of time customers spend protecting and managing systems and data.

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Learn More

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1. Currently available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1; support for other versions is planned to come soon.