The Manchester, UK-based digital certificate and secure solutions specialist acquired secure Linux operating system vendor Trustix AS at the end of 2003 and is now promising to fill the gap left by Sun’s decision to discontinue the Cobalt line with its Xserver CP+ appliance.
The product runs Trustix OS, the company’s security hardened Linux distribution and can be remotely managed using the Trustix CP+ control panel and is designed to simplify web site hosting in the way that made Cobalt such a success in that market.
The best and most effective solutions are those that make life simple. Cobalt exemplified this approach by providing an appliance that was easy to deploy and control, said Steve Roylance, technical marketing director of Comodo Trustix in a statement. Xserver CP+ forms the perfect replacement for existing Cobalt users.
The former development of fast moving server appliance specialist Cobalt Networks Inc, Cobalt’s technology was acquired by Sun Microsystems for a hefty $2bn in stock in September 2000, when it appeared that the future of general purpose computing lay in the hands of dedicated server appliances.
Sun arguably failed to make the most of its assets, and the last of the Cobalt line, the Sun Cobalt RaQ 550 server appliance, reached end of life on February 19, 2004. The custom software code for the RaQ 550 was then released under an open source license through the Japan-basedCobalt User Group and continues to be developed by the group through Project Blue Quartz.
Despite the end of life the number of web servers running Cobalt has actually increased in recent months, according to figures from Netcraft. Its recent market share figures put Cobalt on 20.3% of known Linux distribution web server active sites in July, with an active site growth rate of 13.3% between January and July.
