SANTA CLARA, USA: Sun Microsystems, Inc. and the global OpenSolaris community announced today the immediate availability of OpenSolaris 2008.11.

"Customers wanting to improve their datacenter efficiency and reduce environmental impact can trust Sun to deliver cost effective, highly-efficient open source solutions such as OpenSolaris, GlassFish and MySQL," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "Breakthrough innovations for developers, deployers and administrators in a freely available software platform combined with global service and support is exciting to everyone."

OpenSolaris provides a platform for developers to take their work from testbed to worldwide deployment. New features in OpenSolaris include Time Slider, an easy to use graphical interface that brings powerful ZFS functionality, like instant snapshots, to all users.

Developers also have expanded access to repositories allowing them to get innovations out to all OpenSolaris users through the updated package manager. Sun also extended OpenSolaris subscription options to meet the growing needs of customers who are deploying open source solutions. Customers wanting to run OpenSolaris as their OS of choice now have two affordable subscription support plans from Sun,  production and essentials, depending on their technology and business needs.

Today, Sun and Digital Products Division of Toshiba America Information Systems announced their partnership to deliver OpenSolaris pre-installed on Toshiba laptops in the United States in early 2009.

"We are very pleased to announce plans to include the OpenSolaris OS pre-installed on several of our award winning business Laptops," said Carl Pinto, vice president of product planning and product marketing, Digital Products Division, Toshiba America Information Systems, Inc.

"Sun and Toshiba share a passion for innovation and strong engineering design, and we are excited to be collaborating to optimize OpenSolaris for our platforms," he added.