Sun rolls out much-awaited Solaris 10

SAN FRANCISCO - Sun Microsystems Inc. on Sunday introduced the long-awaited next version of its operating system, Solaris 10, which the network computer maker is betting on to help bring itself back to sustained profitability.

Sun said that Solaris 10, a version of the heavy-duty Unix operating system used by large computer data centers, banks, telecommunications firms and governments, cost more than $500 million in research and development. Sun claims more than 600 new features for Solaris 10.

Sun is relying on Solaris 10, which will be available at the end of January, to set it apart from rivals such as International Business Machines Corp. IBM.N Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc., as it battles back from a series of missteps since the implosion of the dot-com and telecommunications bubbles of the late 1990s, analysts said.

"Solaris 10 is what Sun believes will differentiate itself from companies like Dell and others," said Tony Iams, an analyst at D.H. Brown Associates of Port Chester, New York. "There are a number of very exciting new functions in this release that are going to be very valuable for their existing customers and they're also trying to capture new customers with their Opteron servers."

Santa Clara, California-based Sun has only in the last two quarters rolled out a complete line of servers using Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Opteron microprocessor, which crunches 64 bits of data per computing cycle, compared with the 32 bits that Intel Corp.'s Pentium and Xeon processors do.

Solaris 10 runs on computer servers using Sun's own Sparc processors, so-called x86 processors made by Intel, AMD and others, as well as Opteron chips. Servers are the workhorses of computer data centers and networks.

"We frankly had dropped the ball," said John Loiacono, who runs Sun's software group, referring to the explosion in demand for cheaper, industry-standard servers running freely available Linux operating system. "We did not meet that market need that came 4 years ago."

With Solaris 10 also comes the most definitive sign yet of Sun moving to transform its business model into one based more on software, subscription-based pricing, services and hardware, rather than one based on just selling hardware with software and services as almost an after-thought.

"Sun is trying to move to a business that's somewhat more dependent on software," Iams said.

Last month, Sun posted a narrow quarterly net loss as revenue rose for the second consecutive quarter. Analysts said then Sun's strategy of bundling hardware, storage, software and services into pay-as-you-go offerings and selling servers using Intel and AMD processors appeared to be paying off.

"You should expect more of these and they will become more pervasive," Loiacono said of the subscription-based pricing plans.

Of the many advances in Solaris 10, Iams pointed to Sun's "container" and dynamic tracing, or DTrace, as two of the most significant.

Container technology allows customers to partition a single copy of Solaris into more than 8,000 containers and each can be separated from the others with firewall software, enhancing security.

Solaris 10 also lets customers run software programs -- written for Linux -- natively on the operating system, without modifications, alongside programs written for Solaris, Sun said.

DTrace automatically sniffs out bottlenecks in computer systems and hard-to-find computer bugs and can diagnose them in milliseconds and minutes, not hours or days, Loiacono said.

He said that some customers who have been testing Solaris 10 and DTrace have seen performance increases of as much as 500 percent when using the technology.