Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the global OpenSolaris community jointly announced immediate availability of the OpenSolaris Operating System (OS). OpenSolaris, based on Sun's Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration, delivers an unrivaled development and deployment environment offering the a mix of rapid innovation, platform stability, and support to meet business and development needs, the company said. Download the OpenSolaris OS at http://www.opensolaris.com/.

"OpenSolaris is a massive advancement for OS development and deployment. It combines the strong foundation of Solaris technologies and tools with modern desktop features and applications developed by open source communities such as GNOME, Mozilla, and the Free Software Foundation," said Stephen Lau, OpenSolaris Governing Board member. "OpenSolaris provides an ideal environment for students, developers, and early adopters looking to learn and gain experience with innovative technologies like ZFS, Zones, and DTrace. And yes, it uses bash by default."

The OpenSolaris OS was designed as a platform for innovation to enable developers to quickly develop, test, troubleshoot and deploy their new Web services, HPC, and network applications. LiveCD installation and the new network-based OpenSolaris Image Packaging System (IPS) simplify and speed installation and integration with third-party applications. OpenSolaris IPS increases installation speed and accuracy by providing better control of applications and dependencies and offers easy-to-use system management.

"The Network Economy has ushered in new, dramatically different business models that have changed both the pace and approach with which individuals, communities and companies compete and succeed. It is critical for the participants in this new market to have the right tools and technologies to meet these challenges. From a software perspective, it's clear that open source is the right approach and that OpenSolaris provides the platform to participate, innovate, and ultimately succeed," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems. "I'm tremendously proud of the work the OpenSolaris community has put forth and believe the new OpenSolaris OS sets the innovation benchmark for what's possible in an open source world."

The OpenSolaris OS is the first OS to feature ZFS as its default file system, protecting work with instant roll-back and continual check-summing capabilities to allow users to test ideas. Its Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) feature provides safe, pervasive observability of production systems to accelerate application development and optimization of the AMP/MARS stack. Additionally, Solaris Containers let you build virtualization-aware applications that can be deployed on more than 1,000 systems, from single machines through multi-CPU and multi-core systems, without worrying whether integrating third-party software will work.

OpenSolaris on Amazon's EC2

Amazon and the OpenSolaris community announced the availability of the OpenSolaris OS on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Through the OpenSolaris-Amazon collaboration, customers will have access to Sun's innovative open source software, MySQL premium technical support, as well as key features of the OpenSolaris OS, such as ZFS and Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) running on Amazon's cloud computing platform. Now, developers, enterprises, startups and students have enhanced options and support for rapid development and fast Web deployment on a Web-scale compute infrastructure, with capacity-on-demand. . To access OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2, register at http://www.sun.com/amazon. MySQL can be downloaded for a wide variety of platforms at tp://dev.mysql.com/downloads.

A select group of leading software vendors are already offering their solutions via Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2, including GigaSpaces, Rightscale, Thoughtworks and Zmanda. Sun is also making available the GlassFish application server. OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 is available for no additional charge. Customers pay only for Amazon EC2 usage, which starts at $0.10 per CPU-hour.

OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta is currently available by invitation only. To request an invitation to join the program, visit www.sun.com/amazon. Free technical support for OpenSolaris on Amazon EC2 beta participants is provided by Sun and Amazon EC2 support is provided by Amazon Web Services.

Reliant Security announced it is leveraging the OpenSolaris OS to improve its payment card data security for merchants who need to meet challenging payment card industry data security requirements. "Reliant made a strategic decision to base its Managed PCI System (MPS) product on OpenSolaris because other operating systems didn't meet our security requirements and system resource constraints. With the support of the OpenSolaris community, we have been able to meet a very aggressive production rollout of MPS and are proud to participate in the launch of the first community distribution of OpenSolaris," said Richard Newman, managing partner of Reliant Security.

MySQL Production Support for Amazon EC2

MySQL is one of the most popular databases running on Amazon EC2 today, and a key component of the popular open source LAMP software stack. In response to customer demand, Sun is offering MySQL production support for Amazon EC2 users as part of a premium MySQL Enterprise subscription. Now, Web developers and IT organizations can cost-effectively deliver database driven Web-scale computing in the "cloud" - fully supported by the MySQL database experts at Sun with 24x7 production support and professional service.

This new offering enables users to scale up and out by leveraging MySQL replication on Amazon EC2, and ensures the MySQL database is optimized for Amazon EC2. It also reduces total cost of ownership by eliminating licensing costs, as well as hardware and storage maintenance fees. For supported MySQL platforms, tiered pricing and other information, visit www.mysql.com/ec2.

Join the OpenSolaris Community

As part of today's announcement, the OpenSolaris community is expanding participation as it further innovates the OpenSolaris OS for future releases. The group unveiled its new logo and launched a new Web site--http://www.opensolaris.com/--where users can download the OpenSolaris OS. The OpenSolaris.com site is a destination to learn more about getting started with the OpenSolaris OS, provides a forum to share experiences and enables people all over the world to collaborate with leading members of the OpenSolaris community. The OpenSolaris User Group community is an active and growing collaboration among dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects being created on OpenSolaris.org. For information on the Sun Partner Advantage program for ISV's visit http://sun.com/partners/opensolaris.

About OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems in 2005 to build a developer community around the Solaris Operating System (OS) and in May 2008 the community delivered the OpenSolaris Operating System, a single distribution for desktop, server and HPC deployments. OpenSolaris, based on the Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration, delivers an unrivaled development and deployment environment offering a mix of rapid innovation, platform stability, and support to meet business and development needs. There are more than 100,000 community members registered on OpenSolaris.org. The OpenSolaris project User Group is an active and growing collaboration with dozens of OpenSolaris technology communities and projects being created on OpenSolaris.org and OpenSolaris.com.

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision--"The Network is the Computer"--Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com/.

Max Hetrick is an Information Systems Assistant for an electric utility. He has experience with installation and maintenance of both Windows and Linux operating systems from the PC to server levels. Max is also an open-source software advocate. He welcomes all comments and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..