By William Fellows
Sun Microsystems Inc will send version 8 of its Solaris Unix out to 300 key ISVs at the end of this week. Five ISVs will a get version crafted to run on IA-64 emulator. Meantime, Sun is fashioning a new set of constructs for its Solaris Unix operating system called Genesis that will enable it to deliver more mainframe-style RAS reliability, availabilty and servicability features on its Sparc servers.
A Sun ‘special project’ executive told ComputerWire that Genesis is not a new release of Solaris – version 8 of will reportedly go to beta in September – but an architecture that will underpin a range of enterprise features. The Full Moon clustering and uptime technologies will be supported in Solaris on Genesis. Sun thinks it essential in view of its claim that IBM mainframe users are turning to Sun’s high-end systems in a bid to encourage Big Blue to price S/390 more aggressively. It’s thought that part of the need for Genesis is Sun’s increased footprint in the telecoms market and its requirement for hardened kernel services.
