Can new Solaris beat Linux in server market?

The new , 10 8/07, . The announcement coincides with the company’s event in Boston.

(The chart showing increased chatter concerning OpenSolaris comes from , senior project manager for OpenSolaris engineering.)

The new build has a lot of features enterprise managers will love. Virtualization, performance and resource management were emphasized in the 10 8/07  release. There are new and full integration with PostgreSQL 8.2, a real enterprise-class database.

The flurry of announcements demonstrate Sun’s commitment to expansion in open source while remaining an enterprise vendor for hardware and software. It’s a tough balancing act.

For enterprises 10 8/07 has a Large Send Offload feature to send operations to network interface hardware, and Jumbo Frame support for high-speed packet forwarding. The hope is this will sell CoolThreads servers and 10 Gb Ethernet Networking Cards for high-throughput environments like Web farms.

The Linux support is part of Solaris’ initiative, whose description is “intentionally vague” so it might include (cough, Windows, cough) all sorts of interesting stuff.

The free “community build” edition of OpenSolaris , another milestone toward its , a new OpenSolaris binary distribution.

So the development of Solaris toward becoming an open source, enterprise-class alternative to Linux continues. It’s an effort with legal, business model, and technical dimensions, as Adam Leventhal’s discussion of made clear.

As one-time New York mayor might say,