Update: Sun pulls curtain on Solaris 10, users pleased

Computerworld - SAN JOSE – Calling it "the biggest thing we've done" in nearly a decade, Sun Microsystems Inc. Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy today officially launched the Solaris 10 operating system.
The company said Solaris 10 will help increase system utilization up to 80% for customers, and officials spent much of the day detailing the new system's features. The operating system will be generally available at the end of January.
"I think this is a watershed event for them," said Jean Bozman, an analyst at Framingham, Mass.-based market research company IDG. "This is the one that recognizes how important the volume server portion of the market has become," she said, referring to low-cost servers that have been taking market share away from Unix operating systems.
But Sun isn't retreating from its UltraSparc, RISC-based chips. McNealy, holding a chip on stage, dismissed critics who said "give it up, it's all going to commodity x86" systems, and pointed to the processor, code-named Niagara, with its 32 threads. "This little baby is going to put some more dough in the bank for us," he said.
While Sun was holding its official launch on the West Coast, the future of the operating system, and perhaps Sun itself, was being decided many miles away, at organizations such as the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and FedEx Corp.
Those companies, longtime Sun shops, have been testing the new operating system and are pleased with what it has delivered so far.
Prior to Solaris 10, interest in Sun "was somewhat dwindling," said Don Fike, the technical director at Memphis-based FedEx. But since then, he said, "we've seen Solaris 10 interest is extremely high – a major shift here."
As a result of Solaris 10, Fike said, FedEx's use of Sun systems, which run many of its mission-critical systems, would at least stay the same -- and might even expand.
The major features of Solaris 10 have been available for some time. Over the past 18 months, Sun has gradually released large parts of the Solaris 10 operating system, and the full version is available to users who belong to Sun's Express program.
At today's event, Sun officials were planning to discuss pricing, ranging from free use of Solaris 10 for customers who forgo service and support, to a subscription pricing plan with variable rates depending on the level of service and support that customers seek. Sun will continue to offer its per-CPU operating system pricing for customers who want to capitalize their assets upfront, said John Loiacono, executive vice president