Sun To Ship PostgreSQL With Solaris 10

At a press conference in Boston, the Santa Clara, Calif. company said it will begin supporting and distributing Postgres with Solaris 10 within 30 days and offer 24-hour by 7-day worldwide support.

Initially, the database will ship with Solaris 10 and offer basic provider support for DTrace, a performance tuning utility in Solaris 10.

Longer term, the Unix leader will equip PostgreSQL to exploit core Solaris 10 operating system services including the full Dynamic Trace, (DTrace) performance tuning services, predictive self-healing, containers and clustering, executives said.

Partners said this is part of Sun's plan to lower the economics for all layers of the Solaris stack -- including the database layer. Oracle is the leading enterprise database on Solaris, the partner added.

"It is part of series of moves Sun is making to reduce the total cost of Solaris-based solutions, whether SPARC or x86 64-bit, while at the same time adding functionality and improving performance, and taking market share from Linux/intel solutions," said Ron Herardian, president of Global System Services, a Mountain View, Calif., solution provider.

With its new server offerings Sun is both supporting LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL Perl / PHP / Python) and providing an alternative to it with PostgreSQL and its Java Enterprise Systems software suites, he said.

Sun will support other open-source databases, executives said. The community release of MySQL, for example, is currently bundled with Solaris 10.

Sun also announced a roadmap for delivering its long waited 128-bit Zetabyte File System as well as support for two leading open source technologies -- Xen virtualization and Linux container support – in its commercially supported Solaris 10 and open source version called OpenSolaris.

Next month, Sun will announce an update of Solaris 10 and new technologies for OpenSolaris.

The commercial update, considered a minor upgrade, will offer iSCSI support, enhanced boot support for x64 and x86 platforms, improved network performance and memory management and bug fixes.

More significantly, Sun will provide ZFS integration and build environments for Xen virtualization and Solaris Containers for Linux Applications in OpenSolaris. Then in May of 2006, Sun will offer full integration of Xen and Solaris Containers for Linux Applications in OpenSolaris, executives said.

Linux applications can currently run on the Solaris operating system, but enabling Linux applications to run on Solaris' secure application virtualization Container technology that will allow customers to run multiple workload environments.

Sun expects to release at the same time an update of its commercial Solaris 10 operating system with ZFS integration, added iSCSI support, improved SSL performance, improved network performance, and improved memory management.

In September of 2006, Sun will add support for Solaris Containers for Linux applications and Xen support in Solaris 10.