Sun starts Solaris 10 salutations

Every couple of years, Sun Microsystems kicks off a 'new version of Solaris' celebration. This Unix fiesta, if you will, requires several months of marketing hype before the actual operating system is released. And so the party began this week with Sun's plugs for Solaris 10, which should arrive in the second half of 2004. Linux may have found its way into Sun's StarOffice Impress slides, but Solaris is still king at Sun. The company is making this particularly clear with Solaris 10, releasing the OS with 64-bit versions for both SPARC and Opteron servers. While many pundits say Unix is slowly dying, Sun maintains that Solaris is just getting ready to hit its stride on RISC and elsewhere.

"Our focus on Solaris is a very big competitive advantage for us in the long run," said Jonathan Schwartz, head of software at Sun, during an analyst confab this week.

With Solaris 10, Sun plans to up the competition against AIX and HP-UX on midrange and high-end systems and pitch Solaris as a major competitor to Linux on low-end boxes. For the Unix SMP crowd, Sun has a host of new features, including containers, better diagnostic tools, and beefed up security. At the low-end, Sun is claiming it will soon provide evidence that Solaris 10 can outperform Linux when running standard Web and application server software - be it a one or four processor box.

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