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OpenSolaris takes its bow in Amazon cloud


By Robert Mullins
May 6, 2008 — 
SAN FRANCISCO — Sun Microsystems’ open-source strategy took another step forward yesterday with the unveiling of the first release of the OpenSolaris operating system, the culmination of an open-source project begun by the company in 2005.

Since that time, cloud computing has emerged as a new business model for hosting software applications on the Internet by accessing a provider’s huge data center capacity just as one plugs into an electrical utility grid. Sun also announced that developers can run their applications on OpenSolaris via the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.

Sun announced the OpenSolaris news at its CommunityOne Developer Conference in San Francisco, which precedes its annual JavaOne 2008 Conference May 6 to 9.

OpenSolaris features a network-based image packaging system that allows developers to test, troubleshoot and deploy their applications to run on the OS, and to download and install only the OpenSolaris components they want, rather than loading from a single, all-encompassing bundle. Also, OpenSolaris includes the Zetabyte File System (ZFS) as the default file system for Solaris. The combination of those two features offers “risk-free” computing environment, said Dan Roberts, director of Solaris and OpenSolaris marketing.

When a developer is modifying the operating system to run a new application, and he or she tries different configurations, ZFS will take snapshots so that the developer can restore his system to its original state, Roberts explained. “What that means is I essentially have a big ‘undo’ button that I can press at any time … and I can roll right back to my stable state before that. It gives developers a lot of flexibility to be able to go back to a state and continue from there.”

Sun also announced that developers can host their applications on OpenSolaris on the Amazon EC2 service, rather than incur the expense of running their own data center and only paying for as much computing capacity as they need.

“What we are trying to do is make sure that the entire spectrum, from running your own data center to borrowing a few compute cycles from a company like Amazon,” is available to OpenSolaris developers, said Sun’s vice president of global market development Juan Carlos Soto.

Sun created the OpenSolaris project three years ago to build a developer community around an open-source version of Solaris, and reports that in that time, more than 100,000 community members have registered on OpenSolaris.org. By giving away the OS, Sun’s strategy is to promote additional software development, which is intended to spur sales of Sun technical support contracts and its servers and storage hardware, said Ian Murdock, vice president of developer and community marketing. He was hired by Sun in 2007 to improve the competitiveness of Solaris versus Linux and Windows in the enterprise market.

“We’re providing a free and open-source, production-ready core operating system [and] you don’t have to pay Sun anything. But when you are scaling and you need help, that’s where we make our money,” Murdock said in a keynote address.

OpenSolaris support will become available May 13.


Related Search Term(s): Cloud computing, open source


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