From now until June 30 SDN members can pay $1,499 a year over three years for a subscription and will receive an SunFire VM20z server, which is based on Advanced Micro Devices Inc technology and was launched yesterday.
The VM20z’s regular price is $2,795, which includes Solaris 9.0 for x86, Java Studio Enterprise and Sun Studio for building C/C++ and Fortran applications.
Sun is offering the x86-based machines as an alternative to the company’s traditional SPARC-based workstations as a developer’s platform.
A Sun spokesperson said application developers running Intel Corp x86-based PCs are currently struggling with Microsoft Corp’s Visual Basic programming language. The company wants to encourage these developers to write for Java and the Java Desktop System (JDS) by providing then with an affordable hardware platform.
Sun yesterday also unveiled details about the next planned edition of its Java Enterprise System (JES), which is due next quarter. Version 2.0 will run on Red Hat Linux and feature Sun Cluster 3.1 4/04 software for high-availability of Solaris Opteron x86 and Solaris/SPARC.
Software and web services support will see Web Services Remote Portlet (WSRP) added delivery of portal services between different portal implementations, drag-and-drop access to files and documents through SSL VPNs.
Communications and collaboration services will provide mail, calendar and address book accessible via a web client that is interoperable with Microsoft Outlook.
Solaris, an integral part of JES, sees its next edition released later this year. Six hundred new features include N1 Grid Containers to divide Solaris into 4,000 software partitions per single instance, and predictive self-healing to diagnose and fix faults.
Software Express for the Solaris Operating System will introduce a subscription service for customers to download latest Solaris updates and technologies from Sun.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire
