Sun Microsystems and the global OpenSolaris community announced the availability of the OpenSolaris Operating System (OS).

According to the company, OpenSolaris, based on Sun's Solaris kernel and created through community collaboration, offers the combination of innovation, platform stability and support to meet business and development needs. It combines the foundation of Solaris technologies and tools with desktop features and applications developed by open source communities such as GNOME, Mozilla and the Free Software Foundation.

The system was designed as a platform for innovation to enable developers to develop, test, trouble-shoot and deploy their new web services, HPC and network applications. LiveCD installation and the new network-based OpenSolaris Image Packaging System (IPS) simplify and speed installation and integration with third-party applications.

OpenSolaris is the first OS to feature ZFS as its default file system, protecting work with instant roll-back and continual check-summing capabilities. Its Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) feature provides safe observability of production systems to accelerate application development and optimization of the AMP/MARS stack. In addition, Solaris Containers enable users to build virtualization-aware applications that can be deployed over than 1,000 systems, from single machines through multi-CPU and multi-core systems, the company claims.