Trusted Solaris, which is a special version of Solaris 8 that was created for security-crazed governmental institutions like the U.S. Department of Defense, has now been upgraded to Solaris 8 at the HW 12/02 level. This time around, Trusted Solaris is not only available for Sparc-based servers, but also for X86-based machines. This is the first time Trusted Solaris has been available for Intel Corp and compatible platforms. According to sources at Sun, the company will eventually only sell the Trusted Solaris version of its operating systems, but exactly when it will do that is unclear. It could happen in the current Solaris 9 generation, but it seems likely that Sun will do this when it delivers Solaris 10 with the next generation of its servers and workstations.
Sun has new packaging and pricing for Trusted Solaris. The standard edition, which costs $995 on a desktop machine, is priced aggressively and is not accredited for the common criteria set by the U.S. government. It’s a hardened Solaris that has not been independently certified for specific application stacks. The certified edition of Trusted Solaris costs $2,495 on the desktop and is meets the common criteria and has been independently certified by a third party. Trusted Solaris 8 HW 12/02 will ship sometime in the spring, says Sun.
Sun also debuted its Sun ONE Studio 8 compiler suite for Sparc and X86 architectures. The company says the new software offers up to 30% faster compile times. It also offers command-line interfaces that help programmers speed up common compiling and debugging tasks (mousing and windows still slow a lot of us down). The Sun ONE Studio 8 compiler collection will be available on May 20 and will sell for $995.
The company has also delivered its own Sun ONE Instant Messenger 6.0 realtime communications server for chat, which will be available in May for $30 per user. In addition, Sun is creating a bundle of its Sun ONE Messaging Server (that’s email), Sun ONE Portal Server, and Sun ONE Identity Server as a bundle called the Collaborative Business Platform. This suite is available now, and presumably at a discounted price.
Finally, Sun has debuted a new version of its HPC ClusterTools, which it acquired when it bought the carcass of Thinking Machines (remember Danny Hillis?) back in the mid-1990s. Since that time, the HPC ClusterTools have been the basis of Sun’s business selling clustered machines for parallel supercomputing applications. HPC ClusterTools 5 includes support for the WildCat Sun Fire Link server switch, which is based on Fibre Channel, and now includes Sun’s Grid Engine software and its Studio 7 compilers. Sun is selling the whole shebang in a pre-configured HPC cluster composed of two 24-way Sun Fire 6800 nodes running Solaris 9, WildCat interconnect, HPC ClusterTools, and Grid Engine for $2.1m.
Source: Computerwire
