Solaris 10: Services Uptake Is Small, But Growing Fast

Published: March 23, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

For more than a year, Sun Microsystems has been giving away free binary versions of the Solaris 10 operating system, and has well over 4 million downloads out there in the world, either sitting on hard drives or running on test or production machines. Sun's gambit with the free distribution of Solaris has been that eventually, when companies put it into production, they will inevitably want to get a support contract for the software so it can be patched and updated and that a technically savvy support person is only an email or a phone call away.

Sun has been cagey about how many customers have put Solaris 10 in production situations--mainly, because it really doesn't know, any more than Linux distributors know how many companies have downloaded their distros and are self-supporting them. But Sun does know how many people are paying for tech support, and it is starting to hint that it is getting some traction in this area. According to Mike Harding, vice president of network service offerings at Sun, there are now tens of thousands of paying customers who have acquired support contracts for Solaris 10. "It's a low number right now, but it is now increasing on a hockey stick," he says. "This is very encouraging to me."

Sun's Update Connection service, which provides automated security patch and software upgrade support for Solaris 10, costs $120 per processor socket per year, making it one of the best deals in the IT industry. Sun plans to charge $240 per socket per year for five-day, 12-hour business-class tech support, and $360 per socket per year for 24x7 tech support including Web and telephone support.

Let's compare this to SUSE Linux, which costs about $326 on the street for a license that includes a year of patch support on a two-socket server, or about $163 per socket per year for the same basic online update support that Sun is offering with Update Connection. Under a new bundle that Novell has announced for SUSE Linux, you can get a standard business support contract and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 license for $799 for a two-socket machine for a year's contract; that's list price, not street price, which is about $624. That works out to $312 per socket per year for business-class support for Linux. And for 24x7 support, the Novell SUSE Linux server bundle costs $1,499 at list price, and if street price scales, then this would cost about $1,170 for a one-year contract, or about $585 per socket. Sun has a compelling price advantage, being 38 percent less costly. Of course, SUSE Linux has the advantage of being Linux, the fastest growing platform on the market and one that is supported on a much wider variety of server platforms, and also has the advantage of not being Windows, which is even more expensive than Linux.