Dear Oracle, Don't Mess With These Sun Products

All marriages require compromises, right? The recent and rather surprising announcement of Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems has the technology world on the edge of its collective seat, wondering about the fate of many of Sun's products. Here are our favorite Sun offerings. We hope Oracle is paying attention.

Test Center reviewers loved Sun's software-based virtualization product, VirtualBox. In some instances, VirtualBox gave better performance than Intel's VT-x multiprocessor architecture. With features like USB support, an API for customization, shared folders capability between the guest VM and the host, and encrypted authentication, VirtualBox provides robust virtualization that is ridiculously simple to get up and running.

Sun's Unix operating system is optimized for SPARC systems but also runs on x86 architecture. Stable and highly scalable, Solaris has fully matured with version 10. The user-friendly GUI -- the Java Desktop System -- belies just how powerful this OS is. Critics cite lack of hardware support as a main impediment to more widespread adoption, but with Oracle in the picture, perhaps that issue will be addressed, pushing Solaris more into the mainstream.

What lies ahead for MySQL? That is undoubtedly on the minds of millions of MySQL developers and users, and with good reason. MySQL enjoys the distinction of being the world's most popular open-source database and is a viable competitor to Oracle's and Microsoft's database offerings. With low database TCO, MySQL has been touted for its flexibility and strong feature set.

Sun's professional edition of the OpenOffice.org productivity suite is a true alternative to Microsoft Office Professional. It's a one-size-fits-all solution as it can run on Windows, Solaris, Linux and Mac. StarOffice is a full-blown office application suite with counterparts to Excel, PowerPoint, Access and Outlook. Plus, it's a much more cost-effective solution than Microsoft's Office product. Oracle can utilize the brilliance of StarOffice as a way to garner some of the desktop application market.

In-house developers love the flexibility that open-source code allows them. Because the code is freely distributed, upgrades and bug fixes are often developed more quickly than is the case with proprietary software. Businesses, however, are often reluctant to place mission-critical systems on open-source platforms because of stability issues and lack of support. GlassFish is Sun's attempt to alleviate some of those concerns. GlassFish is an open-source Java application server and is also available in a commercial, enterprise version. It is lauded for its clustering capabilities, high benchmark performance results and affordability.

Sun's foray into the virtual desktop space is its VDI software. VDI allows for virtual desktop hosting, brokering and display. The open architecture enables a choice of virtualization host platforms. Sun highlights VDI's ability to consume less storage than previous solutions and the ability to increase performance of virtual desktop pools.