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Sun Microsystems Inc. last week announced two new commercial versions of the Trusted Solaris operating system for the x86 platform.
The decision to make Trusted Solaris available on Intel Corp.-based servers is part of an overall strategy to renew Suns commitment to the Unix-based operating system on that platform.
“Were very serious about Solaris on the x86 platform. This is yet another show of commitment from us,” said Anil Gadre, vice president of software business management and marketing at Sun, based in Palo Alto, Calif.
Trusted Solaris for years has been available on Suns SPARC platform and has become a favorite of the military and other government organizations. Now the company is introducing a Standard Edition and Certified Edition on x86. The main difference between the two versions is that the Certified Edition has been put through the governments Common Criteria testing program. It has received several certifications at the EAL4 level, which is the highest level of evaluation done by the National Information Assurance Partnership, overseen by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Security Agency.
The higher level of security is especially attractive to companies that handle a lot of sensitive customer data.
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“We find a huge need for this in the banking, financial and health care markets,” Gadre said. “Its for people that just need the tighter access control.”
To that end, Trusted Solaris provides systemwide roles and user privileges, which enable administrators to exercise quite a bit of control over which users are allowed to perform what tasks. Both the Standard and Certified editions also include integrated firewalls. The Standard Edition will sell for $999, while the Certified version will cost $2,495. Both are available now.
Sun also introduced an extension to its Sun ONE Integration Server B2B Edition that enables companies to securely exchange XML and electronic data interchange data over the Internet. Secure Trading Agent supports Secure Sockets Layer for secure transmissions, Simple Object Access Protocol and electronic business XML. The agent is capable of digitally signing each message to help with nonrepudiation and reliability issues.
The agent costs $2,000 per host connection.