Sun Intros OpenSolaris OS, Available On Amazon EC2

open source Operating System PHP

Sun, of Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday said its OpenSolaris Operating System is now available for free download for developers to develop, test, troubleshoot, and deploy new Web services, high-performance computing, and network applications.

The OpenSolaris OS includes Sun's ZFS technology as its default file system. ZFS, which is also used in Sun's own networked storage products, is a 128-bit file system which scales in capacity beyond that of 64-bit file systems, and protects data with 256-bit checksums to ensure that data consistency is maintained.

Also included in the OpenSolaris is Solaris Containers, a server virtualization technology which allows multiple virtualization-aware applications to be deployed on top of a single instance of the Solaris operating system in such a way that a disruption in service with one application does not impact the other applications.

Sun last week made OpenSolaris tools and professional services available to software developers and storage product builders looking to use the operating system in storage-focused applications, including the building of low-cost storage appliances using low-cost x86-based servers.

Along with the release of the OpenSolaris OS, Sun also said on Monday that the operating system will be available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, which is a Web service that provides a resizable compute capacity and allows customers to pay only for the infrastructure software services and capacity that are actually used.

Sun is also offering premium tech support for its MySQL database running on Linux and Amazon EC2.

The OpenSolaris OS is available for no charge, and is currently in beta testing on Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 usage starts at 10 cents per CPU-hour.

Sun and the NetBeans open source community on Monday jointly unveiled the immediate availability of the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Early Access for PHP scripting languages, which Sun said allows NetBeans to be used with Web 2.0-style developers.

It includes such editing features as prioritized code completion, instant rename, mark occurrences, and dynamic code templates, Sun said

Also new is the general availability of NetBeans 6.1 IDE. Version 6.1 includes new features for developing Ajax Web applications using JavaScript, as well as improved integrations with Sun's MySQL database.

The second annual CommunityOne Developer Conference, held this week in San Francisco, is sponsored by Sun, and brings together open source developers and members of the Apache Software Foundation, Eclipse, GlassFish, Grails, MySQL, NetBeans, ODF Alliance, OpenSUSE, OpenID, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris, Python, Ruby, Ubuntu, and others.