To say that Solaris 10 has been successful would be an understatement. The award-winning technical features, the support for a large number of hardware platforms and the process of becoming Open Source via the OpenSolaris project have all contributed to that success. The large number of Solaris 10 downloads (11m+) and OEM agreements with IBM and Dell further validate that success. It is clear that Solaris is and will remain a major operating system for the foreseeable future.
Solaris 8 and 9 customers--who have not yet upgraded to Solaris 10--will find that the many benefits of the new environment will outweigh the costs. Simply replacing old servers with new can result in a savings of space, power and cooling. As there is strong ISV support for Solaris 10 (and Sun provides the Solaris Application Gurantee), most customers should find the move to Solaris 10 straightforward and very worthwhile.
With the appropriate Solaris 10 and Sun hardware features (e.g. resource management, Solaris containers, dynamic system domains and LDoms), many old servers can be consolidated into a smaller number of new servers resulting in even greater savings of cost, space, power and cooling. Most of the new hardware platforms that Sun is now shipping require Solaris 10. These include:
UltraSPARC T1 and T2 based servers (e.g. T2000 and T5120)
Sun Blade Servers (e.g. Sun Blade 6000 modular system)
AMD Opteron based servers (e.g. Sun Fire X4100, Sun Fire X4600)
Intel Xeon based servers (e.g. Sun Fire X5150)
"M" Series SPARC64-VI based servers (M4000, M5000, M8000, M9000)
Solaris 10 has now been distributed for three years. In addition to the initial release, which began shipping in January 2005, there have been four more releases. The current release, "Solaris 10 8/07" or "Update 4," has been in production for 5 months. While there are still some servers shipping which support Solaris 9, it is anticipated that by the end of 2009, all new Sun servers will require Solaris 10.
