Sun Microsystems Inc. is bulking up its Solaris 8 operating environment by tightly linking it with the iPlanet Application Server and improving its Java and storage capabilities.
The combination of the Solaris 8 10.01 OE with the application server will give developers easier access to Suns Web services program, called the Sun Open Net Environment, or Sun ONE, iPlanet officials said.
“This is part of our overall strategy to reach out to developers as part of our Sun ONE initiative,” said Sanjay Sarathy, director of product marketing for iPlanet Application Services. “Developers really need a solid architecture upon which to build their services on demand. Sun and iPlanet provides that architecture.”
Sun made the announcement Tuesday at its first Services on Demand Summit, in Santa Clara, Calif.
Along with the combination of Solaris 8 and the iPlanet app server, Sun, of Palo Alto, Calif., also is embedding the Java 2 Standard Edition Version 1.3.1 software development kit into the OE. The kit is tuned to the latest version of Suns UltraSPARC III CPU, which Sun officials said will improve performance and memory.
J2SE 1.3.1 includes international language support for Java applications, which Sun called a key performance enhancement.
Also, Sun is including greater storage manageability in Solaris 8 by including Disk Soft-Partitions. The Disk Soft-Partitions enable systems administrators to manage large storage devices by defining any number of logical drives of any size. Also, they dont need to buy any more storage management software.
Traditionally, most Unix operating systems have allowed IT administrators to break a large storage disk into eight different ones before forcing them to buy more storage management software. The Sun technology enables them to break one disk into more than 8,000, Sarathy said.
“It enables greater flexibility in a persons storage infrastructure,” he said.
The Disk Soft-Partitions are a feature of DiskSuite 4.2.1, which ships with Solaris 8 and includes the DiskSuite Graphical User Interface.
Also, the iPlanet Application Server, Enterprise Edition 6.0 can be downloaded for unlimited development and evaluation for no additional cost on the Solaris OE SPARC Platform Edition. Before it had been limited to 60 days, Sarathy said.
The Solaris 8 10/01 OE is available for download for free for an unlimited number of systems with a capacity of eight or fewer CPUs. A media kit with additional CDs also is available.
The SPARC version of the media kit is available for $75 and the Intel Corp. version is available for $45.