As it comes closer to becoming reality, Oracle’s purchase of Sun makes more sense, for the simple reason that there is plenty of good technology in Sun — like Java — that Oracle can put to good use. But what is Oracle going to do with its newly acquired OSes?

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Support deals are now the same for the open source and commercial versions of the OS; open source upgrade also adds Sparc support.

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The next version of Sun’s Solaris operating system could be released sometime in mid-2010. Though nothing has been publicly announced, Sun apparently has been telling its customers that this is the targeted release date for Solaris 11, codenamed Nevada. However, the company also has made it clear that the date is “not set in stone,” probably alluding to market conditions.

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Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems announce a multiyear partnership agreement under which HP will distribute and provide software technical support for Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system for HP’s ProLiant rack-mount and blade server systems. The agreement elevates Solaris to the lineup of key operating environments for the HP ProLiant platform, which also includes Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Linux.

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OpenSolaris Delivers Powerful ZFS Functionality and Eco Efficiency for Desktop, DataCenter and Open Storage; OS Optimized for Next-Generation Intel Core Microarchitecture (Nehalem).

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Well, it may be December, but it is time for the OpenSolaris 2008.11 update, the second tweak of the open source variant of the Solaris Unix platform. With the new release today, it’s getting some interesting storage enhancements as well as the usual update additions.

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Sun Leads Development Efforts on New SPECjvm2008 and SPECmail2008 Benchmarks, Sets Bar with Solaris-Powered Results on Prominent Benchmarks.

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Time slider is enabled by default on OpenSolaris so as soon as your machine is running snapshots of your directories will be taken automatically. You can fine tune time-slider’s behavior via System -> Administration -> time slider setup.

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Eighteen months after Sun Microsystems and Intel made peace and announced plans for Intel-based servers as well as working together on Intel-optimized software, the two companies held a briefing with reporters here Tuesday to update their progress and future direction.

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Sun will release its May 2008 build of OpenSolaris (2008.05) the Open Source operating system based on the source code of the Solaris 10 enterprise UNIX OS, the first to be designated with “Production” support offerings. While very much community software and not yet at the level of polish for end-user adoption that many of the latest Linux distributions are now enjoying — shows promise and enormous potential as an enterprise-class UNIX desktop and server with an Ubuntu-like flavor.

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Sun has announced Solaris On Demand, its software as a service (SaaS) program for the independent software vendor (ISV) community. This program provides ISVs with the technology, hosted infrastructure and services needed to offer their software as a service. It is especially targeted at ISVs with a traditional, on-premise license model who want to offer their existing application on-demand without having to use a multitenancy application architecture. To provide the hosting services, Sun is working with several partners such as NaviSite for U.S.-based and European Union companies, AT&T’s USi for U.S.-based companies and NTT Europe Online for European Union companies. With the Solaris On Demand program, ISVs can create offerings that meet the application availability, security, scalability and cost requirements of their own customers. To join the Solaris On Demand program, visit http://www.sun.com/ondemand.

The National Security Agency and Sun Microsystems have begun work on a patch that will outfit Sun’s Solaris operating system with the National Security Agency’s mandatory access control (MAC) mechanism, the two organizations announced last week.

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