Sun lines up partners behind Solaris

Sun is working to gather support from software and hardware vendors to compete with Linux

IBM is expected to announce support for Solaris 10 for its blade servers running on x64 processors within the next few weeks, Sun Microsystems' executive vice president for software John Loiacono said at a town hall meeting in its San Francisco office.

Solaris 10 started shipping last January. While the software is available free of charge, Sun still makes money selling support contracts. The platform has more than three million users.

Loiacono boasted that the OS is doing much better than expected. The company initially anticipated only a few hundred thousand users by now, he told vnunet.com.

The operating system's source code was released in June. More than 90,000 developers signed up to the open source programme. They have filed 40 contributions, 12 of which have been integrated into Solaris. Most of the contributions are bug fixes, Loiacono said.

IBM's support for the operating system is important as Sun is working to gather support from software and hardware vendors to compete with Linux.

"The volume [in users] brought ISVs, and ISVs are bringing customers," Loiacono said.

Computer Associates is set to unveil a version of its Unicenter system management software for Sun's Solaris 10 operating system on x64 servers, Loiacono said.

The support from CA is hardly a surprise. The company has been traditionally very loyal in backing pervious versions of Sun's operating system.