Sun is to make the Solaris 10 operating system, which it
announced at its Network Computing 04Q4 product launch event last
week, available free of charge.
The move is part of its strategy to combat the growth of Linux in
the datacentre, said analysts.
The company plans to make Solaris 10 available for Sparc, x86, and
both AMD's and Intel's hybrid 32-/64-bit chips as a free download
by the end of January 2005. Public and private sector organisations
will benefit from the offer, the company said.
Users who require a maintenance contract will have to pay an annual
subscription ranging from £65 to £194 per CPU. The basic service
provides users with Solaris 10 updates, upgrades and fixes and
90-day installation and configuration support. The Premium Service
offers 24x7 phone support and technical and educational
services.
Sun has developed a service called Update Connection, which allows
its maintenance service subscribers to analyse and update their
systems and stay up-to-date.
Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief operating officer, Sun
Microsystems, said, "Customers and partners are not just buying the
raw technology of Solaris when they look at the latest upgrade,
they want to know how quickly and painlessly they can leverage the
new release for their business advantage."
Ian Brown, research director at Gartner, said Solaris 10
represented a significant update for existing users who may be
evaluating Linux for low-end installations as well as for IBM and
Hewlett-Packard alternatives in their datacentres.
Version 10 will allow Sun to boost performance against IBM and HP.
Sun has improved performance with the new release claiming Solaris
10 was more than 40% faster than Solaris 9 in web server
performance on Sparc and Intel x86 chips.
Brown highlighted Sun's effort to tackle competition from Linux,
which he said was a key driver behind its decision to develop an
x86 version of Solaris 10 and to offer the once high-priced
operating system for free.
"Solaris running on AMD Opteron would offer comparable performance
to Linux on one- to four-processor servers," he said.
Another facet of Sun's strategy to protect its position against
Linux is in its promise of backward compatibility of the operating
system kernel.
With the Solaris Application Guarantee, Sun said it would ensure
that applications written for previous versions of Solaris would
run on Solaris 10. By extending backward compatibility to Solaris
2.6, this guarantee covers an unprecedented seven years of
operating system releases.
Challenges of Linux roll-outs >>