Sun Microsystems Launches Latest Version of OpenSolaris; Unveils Time Slider Visualization Tool and New Partnership with Toshiba to Build Line of OpenSolaris Laptops

OpenSolaris Delivers Powerful ZFS Functionality and Eco Efficiency for Desktop, DataCenter and Open Storage; OS Optimized for Next-Generation Intel Core Microarchitecture (Nehalem)

SANTA CLARA, CALIF. - Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:JAVA) and the global OpenSolaris community announced today the immediate availability of OpenSolaris 2008.11. Join Sun and the growing community of developers and partners at 12:00pm EST / 9:00am PST for a live web chat with core OpenSolaris software engineers. Download OpenSolaris.

“Customers wanting to improve their datacenter efficiency and reduce environmental impact can trust Sun to deliver cost effective, highly-efficient open source solutions such as OpenSolaris, GlassFish and MySQL,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “Breakthrough innovations for developers, deployers and administrators in a freely available software platform combined with global service and support is exciting to everyone.”

OpenSolaris provides a platform for developers to take their work from testbed to worldwide deployment. New features in OpenSolaris include Time Slider, an easy to use graphical interface that brings powerful ZFS functionality, like instant snapshots, to all users. Developers also have expanded access to repositories allowing them to get innovations out to all OpenSolaris users through the updated package manager. Sun also extended OpenSolaris subscription options to meet the growing needs of customers who are deploying open source solutions. Customers wanting to run OpenSolaris as their OS of choice now have two affordable subscription support plans from Sun - production and essentials - depending on their technology and business needs.

Today, Sun and Digital Products Division of Toshiba America Information Systems announced their partnership to deliver OpenSolaris pre-installed on Toshiba laptops in the United States in early 2009. “We are very pleased to announce plans to include the OpenSolaris OS pre-installed on several of our award winning business Laptops,” said Carl Pinto, vice president of product planning and product marketing, Digital Products Division, Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc. “Sun and Toshiba share a passion for innovation and strong engineering design, and we are excited to be collaborating to optimize OpenSolaris for our platforms.”

World Record Performance

In the past six months, OpenSolaris has achieved several world-record benchmarks and top performance results. Just this month, Sun delivered a world record open source result of 1197.10 SPECjAppServer2004JOPS@Standard. The SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark is the first all open source stack published and delivered at an order of magnitude of better price and performance score as compared to competition. This result demonstrates Sun’s advantage in the Web 2.0 and Enterprise deployments market and reflects the complex applications and high-volume transaction processings in the customer environment.

In addition to performance gains this latest version makes it easier for companies to deploy OpenSolaris solutions within their datacenters. These enhancements include a new Automated Installer application, allowing users to decide which packages to include within the installation web service, the Distro Constructor, enabling users to create their own custom image for deployment across their systems and a new storage feature, COMSTAR Storage Framework, that allows developers to create an open storage server with OpenSolaris.

OpenSolaris with Intel and AMD

OpenSolaris 2008.11 takes advantage of current generation Intel Xeon processors and the next generation Intel Core microarchitecture (codenamed Nehalem). This OS release will be optimized for the next generation Intel Core microarchitecture. A few highlights of the enhanced OS further enables support for improved overall system performance by taking advantage of Intel Quick Path Interconnect, better scalability with Intel Hyper-Threading technology and virtualization with support for Intel Virtualization Technology. For more information.

“Intel is an active leader in the open source development community,” said Doug Fisher, Intel vice president and general manager System Software Division. “Through deep technical collaborations with Sun, OpenSolaris 2008.11 includes optimizations for performance, scalability, power management and virtualization for Intel Xeon based systems. This solution provides a powerful combination for our customers and developers for current and next generation Intel Core microarchitecture.”

Furthermore, Sun and AMD are collaborating to take advantage of the latest AMD Opteron processor technology. The OpenSolaris community provides AMD the opportunity to directly add support for its new Shanghai processor features as they become available, and provides immediate access to the source OS for improved tuning of processor performance.

“In the current economic environment, the 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is the right solution at the right time for the OpenSolaris community. With the industry’s most consistent x86 platform, we offer IT managers an evolutionary option to achieve revolutionary performance and performance-per-watt increases,” said Randy Allen, senior vice president, Computing Solutions Group, AMD. “In addition, we have developers at our Operating System Research Center directly contributing to the OpenSolaris community through work on next-generation features to help improve the overall reliability and manageability of AMD Opteron processor-based systems.”

About OpenSolaris

OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems in 2005. In May 2008 the community delivered the OpenSolaris OS, 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 the right mix of rapid innovation, platform stability and support to meet business and development needs. There are more than two hundred thousand registered community members.


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 www.sun.com.