Solaris To Get PostgreSQL, XEN, ZFS In &'06

In the short term, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company said it will begin supporting and distributing Postgres with Solaris 10 within 30 days and offer 24x7 worldwide support for the popular database.

Initially, the database will exploit some of Solaris&' Dynamic Trace (DTrace) performance tuning utility.

Long term, the Unix leader will equip PostgreSQL to exploit core Solaris 10 operating system services including predictive self-healing, containers and clustering, executives said.

Partners said this is part of Sun&'s plan to lower the economics for all layers of the Solaris stack—including the database tier. (Oracle is the leading enterprise database on Solaris.)

“It is part of a series of moves Sun is making to reduce the total cost of Solaris-based solutions, whether SPARC or x86 64-bit—while at the same time adding functionality and improving performance, and taking market share from Linux/Intel solutions,” said Ron Herardian, president of Global System Services, a Mountain View, Calif., solution provider.

Sun recently announced it will offer its Java Enterprise System at no cost. Solaris is also available at no cost currently without support.

With its new server offerings, Sun supports LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) and an alternative stack in the form of PostgreSQL and Sun&'s Java Enterprise System, the company said.

Sun also will support other open-source databases. The community release of MySQL, for example, is currently bundled with Solaris 10. The company has not stated whether it will support Oracle's free Oracle 10g Express database, launched in October, although Sun always evaluates options, a spokeswoman said.

On the commercial side, Sun plans to announce an updated Solaris 10 in December that offers iSCSI support, enhanced boot support for x64 and x86 platforms, improved network performance and memory management and bug fixes.

In 2006, Sun plans more significant upgrades of Solaris 10.X. In May, Sun will integrate the company&'s 128-bit Zetabyte File System, added ISCSI support and improved SSL.

In September, Sun expects to deliver Xen virtualization and Solaris Containers for Linux Applications.

Those capabilities will also be offered for OpenSolaris in 2006.