Posted by : Anonymous on Oct 30, 2005 - 01:20 PM Linux

IBM in a few weeks is expected to announce support for Solaris 10 for its blade servers running on x64 processors, Sun Microsystems' executive vice president for software John Loiacono said at a town hall meeting in its San Francisco office.
Solaris 10 started shipping last January. While the software is available free of charge, Sun still makes money selling support contracts. The platform has more than 3m users.
Loiacono boasted that the OS is doing much better than expected. The company initially anticipated only a few hundred thousand users by now, he told vnunet.com.

The operating system's source code was released in June. More than 90,000 developers signed up to the open source programme. They have filed 40 contributions, 12 of which have been integrated into Solaris. Most of the contributions are bug fixes, Loiacono said.

IBM's support for the operating system is important as Sun is working to gather support from software and hardware vendors to compete with Linux.

"The volume [in users] brought ISVs, ISVs are bringing customers," Loiacono said.

Computer Associates later today is set to unveil a version of its Unicenter system management software for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system on x64 servers, Loiacono said.

The support from CA is hardly a surprise. The company has been traditionally very loyal in backing pervious versions of Sun's operating system.

The enterprise management software will hook into some of the management tools that are available in Solaris today, including DTrace and Solaris Containers. DTrace allows for system optimisation by tracking down bottlenecks in applications. Containers offer administrators to create virtual compartments inside a system with each container running a separate instance of the operating system.

In addition, CA will make available its Unicenter Database Management Solution on the Solaris 10 operating system, supporting both Oracle and IBM's DB2 UDB databases. The software vendor also plans to release a version of its BrightStor applications for Solaris.

Together with the CA announcement, Sun later today is also set to unveil that its Java Enterprise System (JES) release 4 has added support for HP-UX and Windows 2000 Server. The actual software already started shipping last week, Loiacono said. Support for Windows Server 2003 is set to follow by January. The software already supports Red Hat Linux and Solaris for Sparc and x64 processors.

JES is a collection of middleware for applications such as identity management, server clusters, application server or collaboration. The full suite of applications is available for $140 per user per year. Individual applications cost $50 per user per year.

Sun does not expect a lot of revenues from selling the applications on these platforms. Customers however consider support for multiple platforms a " checkbox item" Loiacono said, meaning that they want to have the option out even if they do not actually need it.

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