Sun Microsystems’ server revenue climbed almost 14 percent since the second quarter last year, pushing Sun ahead of Dell in the rankings. What is Sun’s winning strategy?
Solaris on Opteron
Sun picked up what other vendors like IBM and HP long treat as secondary to Intel Xeon. With the acquisition of Kealia in early 2004, Sun set its sights on creating usefully-differentiated AMD Opteron-based systems.
After two years, Sun now offers from a single-chassis eight-socket server to a four-socket blade that is solely about heavy-duty data center infrastructure to the ultimate Sun Fire X4500 direct-attached storage, all taking standard volume components.
These are computing commodities. Sun is open to put anything on it should the market requires. Combining Sun’s quality with the cost effective volume components, it finally gets out of the deadlock of staying unique and passionate about computers and offering them at a competitive market price.
Success: Become a player in the computing commodities.
NexentaOS is a complete GNU-based open source operating system built on top of the OpenSolaris kernel and runtime. So what’s the big deal?
It’s a “best of both worlds” kind of operating system gluing SunOS kernel with GNU software. SunOS kernel is the most sophisticated UNIX kernel, period. Even Google Inc. is experimenting with the open-source version of Sun Microsystems Inc.’s Solaris operating system as a possible long-term prelude to replacing its massive global network of Linux servers, according to sources. GNU software is what make Linux so popular among different class of users.
Nexenta’s Alpha 5 release is available as an installable ISO or LiveCD that is released on 15 June. NexentaOS currently requires 32- or 64-bit x86/x64 platform with at least 256MB RAM, and a CD-ROM drive. You can try out the OS using the Getting Started Guide (pdf) to install. LiveCD needs 512MB RAM for root partition’s ramdisk and kernel loaded together.