“Open source is valuable and viable”

Anil Valluri, Director, Client Services Organisation, Sun Microsystems India, talks about the benefits of open source OSs and Solaris 10.

Do you think that CIOs who are comfortable with a proprietary OS will want to migrate to an open source product?

The pressure to deliver bottom-line results is leading businesses to look for new ways to drive costs down in their operations. Open source is a way of creating valuable, viable software in an environment of shared intellectual property.

The central premise is that no single vendor will have all the necessary resources, or find it strategically viable, to build all of the functionality that a wide range of users will need. So open source creates a collaborative effort based on the notion of community property. Open source economics are particularly effective with platform software such as OSs, browsers and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) that are hard to create, but for which no rational customer would be willing to pay the true costs.

What are the challenges during migration from Solaris 9 to open source Solaris 10, and how can they be resolved?

Migration from Solaris 9 to open source Solaris 10 is completely hassle-free since Sun assures binary compatibility between the two versions.

What are the advantages that Solaris 10 gives a CIO?

Solaris 10 offers a number of benefits. The developer community gets more of the features it wants without any commercial clutter. The technology evolves faster as more developer effort can be applied to the features, and stability is achieved sooner as every beta tester can be a bug fixer.

Development costs can go down since it will be possible to harness global talent pools. User populations are higher as the software is free in binary and source form. A number of new features such as predictive self-healing and Zetabyte File System ensure continual availability.

DTrace, a real-time system diagnostic engine built to run on production systems, gives organisations performance and operating data and allows them to pinpoint bottlenecks.

- Soutiman Das Gupta