Open choice: Solaris or OpenSolaris

With over 12 million downloads worldwide, Solaris is one of the most popular operating systems.

Today there are two distinct flavours of Solaris: OpenSolaris and Solaris 10. Both share the same original DNA and deliver multi-platform, multi-vendor interoperability.

Based on a common platform, Solaris and OpenSolaris are simply two delivery models, both of which provide users with:

• Real-time debugging and optimisation through DTrace
• Predictive self healing – automatic diagnosis and recovery
• Guaranteed data integrity with ZFS

So, where do you deploy one in preference to the other?

Each is best suited to different business requirements. It is like driving two cars - one designed for the fast-paced Web economy and the other designed for the highly- available enterprise data centre.

Solaris

Fully tested, certified and supported, Solaris is ideal for users that require stable, secure, yet flexible and scalable environments. With virtualisation in-built at no cost, Solaris sets a new standard for return on investment.

To tackle issues such system performance and resource management, Solaris enables enterprises to:

• Cut costs with virtualisation technologies via Solaris Containers and xVM server
• Optimise utilisation to reduce number of servers required
• Run multiple, independent network stacks on a single system for improved network performance
• Scalable to hundreds of processors

As the winner of the ‘Most Innovative Server OS’ category in the InfoWorld 2008 Technology of the Year Awards, Solaris 10 is described as “simply the most innovative version of a server operating system this decade.”

Free to download and use – Solaris 10 delivers guaranteed compatibility with half the support costs of other open source operating systems.

Solaris 10 takes advantage of the latest in processor architectures including Intel Xeon, AMD Opteron, Sun UltraSPARC and Sun CoolThreads (CMT) processor technologies.
There are more than 45 OEMs, including IBM, HP and Dell, licensed to offer their own branded systems with Solaris 10 preinstalled.

Solaris 10 runs on more than 900 x86 systems including Dell, HP, IBM, Fujitsu and more, which is 30 per cent more than Red Hat Linux 4.

What you get from Solaris 10

Download the latest Solaris 10 OS

OpenSolaris

When Sun open sourced Solaris 10 in 2005, the same DNA was used to create OpenSolaris. Not just an operating system, OpenSolaris is a source base and a community: opensolaris.org - which today has more than 75,000 members.

OpenSolaris has embraced and taken advantage of three years of open source community development and innovation.

With a short release cycle of six months, OpenSolaris is ideal for organisations, such as Web 2.0 companies that require the most up-to-date mobile and web application technology.

Community engagement has always been one of the most important ways Sun innovates in the marketplace. Innovative technology evolves from combining the efforts of the broadest possible community with the support of a commercial supplier.

The OpenSolaris community gives developers, systems administrators, educators and new users the opportunity to collaborate with Sun and other community members on the future of ultra-secure operating systems.

With OpenSolaris, individuals and companies are able to contribute to its development and ensure it is the best operating system available.

The technology developed from the OpenSolaris Project is then the base for future versions of the Solaris operating system.

View Jonathan Schwartz’s video on open minds: the OpenSolaris story.

Download OpenSolaris