Sun Microsystems is to make Solaris on x86 more
attractive to users by broadening application support.
Company officials said Sun is working with as many as 150 key
business application suppliers, including BEA Systems, Oracle and
Sybase, to ensure that their applications are optimised for Solaris
on x86.
John Loiacono, vice president of operating platforms at Sun,
said it was vital that Solaris on x86 has up-to-date support from
mainstream business application suppliers. "Without applications,
the platforms aren't very useful," he said.
Sun has hired developers to support Solaris on the 64-bit
Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices. Loiacono said Sun
has no plans to do likewise for Intel's 64-bit Itanium because it
does not see a customer demand for it. The Opteron support may be
ready by the middle of next year.
Sun's efforts to boost Solaris on x86 began in earnest in May,
when it released servers running Intel's Xeon processors.
The company maintains that Solaris.Next - what might otherwise
be called Solaris 10 - will offer strong incentives for companies
to opt for Unix on Intel over Windows or Linux. The next version of
Solaris is set for release in the fourth quarter of 2004.
Solaris.Next will include self-healing capabilities to deal with
problems created, for instance, by application memory leaks; file
systems that scale to handle terabytes of data; and security
capabilities already available in Sun's Trusted Solaris version
that allow access control at the root level.
IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky said Sun's x86 strategy has been hurt
by the perception that the company is not as willing to embrace the
Intel platform as its competitors. To convince users otherwise, Sun
will have to take measures, such as porting all its tools to the
x86 version of Solaris, he said.
Patrick Thibodeau writes for
Computerworld