Why Solaris 10 has become the platform of choice

Sun's Solaris 10 operating system celebrated its second birthday on 31 January and this year, the party just got bigger.

Sun has issued more than 7 million Solaris 10 licences since January 2005 - that's more than the combined shipments of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, IBM AIX and Hewlett Packard HP-UX over the same period.

Solaris becomes platform of choice for businesses

Sun's continued growth during the past twelve months has been driven by the increased adoption of the open source Solaris platform. Ninety-seven of the Fortune 100 and 85 per cent of Fortune 500 companies use Solaris 10.

These organisations have adopted Solaris 10 as their platform of choice because it provides:

• Greater application availability

  There are more applications available for Solaris 10 than other Unix and Linux-based operating systems. You have a broader choice of applications with Solaris 10. As of January 2007 Sun has certified 4,495 applications, more than double the number that run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0.

• Guaranteed compatibility

  Solaris 10 is still the only operating system that guarantees application compatibility between releases. It means you can run existing Solaris applications unmodified on Solaris 10 while taking full advantage of new features, enabling them to maximise their investment.

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 users are not so lucky.

  In July 2007, Red Hat users will have to decide whether to keep running with diminished support, or upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, with no guarantee that their infrastructure and applications will be compatible.

• Support for multiple hardware platforms

  Solaris 10 runs on more than 840 hardware platforms, including Sun's entire range of servers, and x86-architecture rack and blade servers from major vendors including Dell, HP and IBM. This gives you more choice and greater flexibility.

• Easy management and updates

  There are now more than 140,000 registered licenses for Solaris 10 in Australia and New Zealand. And with the new Solaris 10 feature, Sun Connection for automatic software updates, it has never been easier to manage updates, configure changes, and re-deploy systems for new purpose.

  View the Google Mash-up of the 4,800 Solaris 10 machines across Australia and New Zealand already benefiting from Sun Connection.

• Low-cost solution

  Solaris 10 is the most affordable operating system on the market. You can use Solaris 10 at no cost - that's a zero licensing cost.

  Solaris 10 also offers a far lower cost of maintenance - up to 50 per cent lower than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

  Compare the cost of a one-year Standard Support Contract for a two-socket x86 server
  Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS	Solaris 10
  A$1,897	A$911
  That's a difference of A$986 per machine a year.

  Notes:
  (1)	Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS support contract cost is as published on http://www.redhat.com/rhel/compare/server/ on Feb 28, 2007 - based on US prices and 0.79 exchange rate
  (2)	Solaris 10 support contract cost is as published on http://www.sun.com/service/subscriptions/prices.html#standard on Feb 28, 2007 - based on US prices and 0.79 exchange rate

For more information on Solaris 10:
Contact your Sun account representative or email us