Sun will position Solaris against Red Hat Linux in low-end servers, while embracing Linux as well. Sun's newly clarified dual-OS strategy includes plans for a Linux compatibility layer for Solaris and an open source version of Solaris, and it increasingly resembles Linux strategies adopted by traditional embedded RTOS companies.

Sun's strategy announcements came yesterday during its quarterly earnings conference, and during a well-publicized meeting with Wall Street customers.

At the same time that Sun plans to push Solaris into the low-end server market, it is embracing and supporting Linux in that and other markets. For example, the company announced last week that it will ship Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) on a new line of inexpensive servers for the telecom/datacom space, a market where Solaris has been strong in the past.

Sun's dual-OS strategy increasingly resembles those of a number of traditional embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) companies that have been forced to reckon with the emergence of Linux as the standard embedded operating system. Companies supporting Linux alongside legacy proprietary RTOSes (real-time operating systems) include LynuxWorks, Wind River, and Enea.

Sun's interest in Linux fueled rumors last week that it would acquire embedded Linux company MontaVista, but LynuxWorks may be a more probable option, given LynuxWorks's experience with binary compatibility libraries. LynuxWorks worked for three years on technology that lets unaltered Linux binaries run on its proprietary LynxOS RTOS, before shipping its Linux ABI (application binary interface) Compatibility Layer in March of 2002. Sun has said it will ship a Linux compatibility library with a new version of Solaris expected this year.

Sun's strategic shift to drive both Linux and Solaris into new markets comes as the company appears to be gaining its feet somewhat, financially. The company reported negative but vastly improved results for its most recent quarter, losing only $388 million on sales of $11.9 billion for the quarter that ended June 30, Associated Press reports. The same quarter in 2003 saw a staggering loss of $3.43 billion on sales of $11.43 billion.

Not only did Sun's loss narrow by a factor of ten, its 2004 loss was offset by a gain of $1.95 billion from a settlement with Microsoft, AP reports.

AP reports that during the conference, Sun executives drew a bead on Red Hat, stating that Solaris offers significant advantages over Red Hat Enterprise Linux when run on low-cost servers with AMD Opteron (64-bit) processors. “We are very much a good citizen of the community and love the Linux community. But we believe we have a superior product offering from a performance, stability, security, and price advantage standpoint compared to the brand of Linux called Red Hat,” AP quotes Sun's chief marketing officer Anil Gadre as saying.

 
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