Sun Puts On Red Hat

Sun Microsystems plans to use the popular Red Hat Linux distribution when it rolls out systems later this year based on a per-usage pricing model, an initiative dubbed Project Orion, according to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's executive vice president of software.

"We are going to deliver Project Orion on Red Hat [Linux]," Schwartz said at Sun's iForce Partner Summit here. "Let's just get the issue off the table."

In March, Schwartz said that the company would back away from offering its own Linux distribution as part of its plan to bundle all of its software, including the Sun One Java stack, into Linux and Sun's Solaris operating environment (see related story).

Facing massive customer defections from its Unix-based servers, Sun introduced its own Linux distribution, Sun Linux, based on market leader Red Hat last August. The custom, Sun-engineered distribution offered additional functionality, including Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4, Sun Streaming Server, MySQL, Web cache, Apache servers and the Sun Grid engine.

Speaking to CRN Monday, Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy said Sun is going with Red Hat because it is a de facto standard for Linux in the industry, and standardizing on it will make it easier for customers to adopt Linux going forward.

"The world is having a hard enough time trying to figure out whether they want to have a new OS," McNealy said. "All the different Linuxes are different. It's just complicated out there. I'm not sure what value we add because Linus (Torvalds) dictates what [Linux] is anyhow. And so, let's just take off-the-shelf strategies out there."

Project Orion, the first phase of which is slated to be available in the fall, will build all of Sun's software into the Solaris OS or Red Hat Linux for a yearly subscription. Sun executives said the model is more predictable and paves the way for "metered" billing.

Joseph F. Kovar contributed to this article.

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