Sun to Take On Linux with Free and Open Solaris

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems has been talking about its plans for its Solaris 10 operating system so much that it is sometimes hard to remember that it wasn't actually announced until this week. Finally, after 3,000 engineering years and over $500 million in research and development spread over several years, Solaris 10, with over 600 new features, was unveiled at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, California.

While the technical features of Solaris 10 will make it a compelling offering for entry, midrange, and enterprise accounts that are weighing the pros and cons of Unix, Linux, Windows, and other platforms for hosting their applications, this week's Solaris announcement is as much about perception, packaging, and pricing as it is about technology. You see, Sun is not only going to take Solaris 10 open source, but it is also going to give it away for free. That zero-dollar price tag for the software levels the playing field with Linux, the main adversary of Solaris in the IT market these days, no matter how many times Sun's top brass claims to be embracing Linux as a brother to Unix and therefore Solaris. As everyone knows, each of the major Unix players wanted to take over the IT world, and it is only their infighting and their lack of understanding about the compelling nature of the open source community that left an opening for Linus Torvalds to create Linux in the first place. Had Sun or any of the other Unix players been thinking correctly, any one of their Unixes could have been in the driver's seat like Linux is today. It is too late to change that history, but it is not too late to learn an important lesson. If Solaris is going to beat Linux in the market, it is going to have to take on some of its open source and support-based pricing models. And that is exactly what Sun is doing.

With Solaris 10, the right to use license for the operating system, whether it runs on an X86 platform or a Sparc platform, is free, just like Linux. Sun has said that it has the legal right to take Solaris open source, and it has promised that it will do that within 60 to 90 days. So Solaris 10 will be open source, with an OSI-compliant license that allows companies to create their own Solaris distribution if they so choose. While that Open Solaris license will not be the same as the GPL license that governs Linux, it will be close enough for development work--which is important, since open source, contends Sun, is mostly important for the upper echelons of developers who want to look into the guts of an operating system to improve it and the applications they create for those platforms.

According to Tom Goguen, the newly anointed vice president of marketing for Solaris at Sun, Red Hat's whole marketing model for Linux is what Sun is aiming at with Solaris 10. "We've looked at the pricing for Solaris 10 and its support offerings, and we have planned it to be anywhere from 20 to 40 percent less expensive than what you pay for Red Hat Linux."

Solaris 10 will be the first Solaris operating system that supports 64-bit operations on both Sparc and X86 architectures (including Xeon-64 chips from Intel and Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices, but not including Intel's Itanium 2 chips). Sun has been previewing Solaris 10 features in its Software Express beta program (which has seen more than 500,000 downloads since last summer), including a significantly improved TCP/IP stack, a performance and diagnostic tool called DTrace, and a new file system called ZFS. Solaris 10 will also include a new dynamic logical partitioning feature that is now called Solaris Containers (it was being called N1 Grid Containers, but sensible marketing has prevailed). The last feature fills in a serious gap. Solaris on Sparc platforms have had hardware partitions for many years, but they have not had dynamic logical partitions that compete with the virtualization technologies available on rival IBM's and Hewlett-Packard's Unix platforms and on X86 servers running Windows and Linux through such software as VMware's GSX Server and ESX Server and Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005. Finally, Solaris 10 includes a Linux runtime environment that is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0, and over time, Sun will add in runtimes for other Linuxes, such as SuSE. Linux applications compiled for Red Hat just plunk into this environment, which pretends to be Linux but is really just a shell making calls to equivalent Solaris features.

If you want Solaris 10, you are going to have to wait a little bit longer. Goguen says that Solaris 10 will be generally available as a download from Sun's Web site either the last week of January or the first week of February 2005. The software will also be available as a shrink-wrapped package for a nominal fee that covers the cost of CDs, packaging, and documentation. For the compiled version of Solaris 10, quarterly releases of the software and security patches (as they are needed) will be available for free, but you have to register to get them. This free version of the software will not have instantaneous online patches available; this feature, like Microsoft's Windows Update and Red Hat's Network, will be available through Sun's own Customer Network Services.

As we go to press, Sun is still trying to finalize the names of the support services for Solaris 10, but there will be three different levels, and initially Sun is only talking about prices for machines that span up to four processors. The basic support level will cost $120 per CPU per year, and it will include 90 days of installation and configuration support, the online, real-time Customer Network Services patch support, and some online courses to explain Solaris 10 features. This basic support offering does not include Web or telephone tech support. The standard Solaris 10 support will include 5 day, 12-hour telephone and Web support with unlimited calls, plus all the features of basic support and a few more training courses for $240 per CPU per year. The advanced support will boost the telephone and Web tech support to 7 day, 24 hour coverage and throw in more training goodies for $360 per CPU per year. Obviously, on bigger Sparc boxes, Solaris 10 support is going to cost more. Just how much, Sun is not prepared to say, but Robbie Turner, vice president of services marketing at Sun, says that it will not simply continue upward in a linear fashion from the pricing model they have built for four-way and smaller machines. She says that it would be prohibitively expensive for customers on Sun Fire servers if they did it this way.