News

CA Supports Solaris 10 with Unicenter and BrightStor

• By John K. Waters
• October 26, 2005

Computer Associates is set to port its Unicenter Database Management System to Sun Microsystems' Solaris 10 operating system, supporting both Oracle and IBM databases. CA also plans to make its BrightStor storage management solutions available on the OS.

CA's Unicenter solutions will exploit several features of Solaris 10, including Solaris Containers, which isolate applications and services using virtualization and software partitioning technologies, and the DTrace dynamic tracing framework.

Initially, CA will build a management platform for Sun's UltraSPARC and AMD Opteron processor-based systems running the Solaris 10 OS, based on its Unicenter and BrightStor product lines. Sun and CA have worked together to integrate Sun Management Center software, a key systems management product in Sun's N1 software portfolio, with Unicenter Network and Systems Management (NSM), so that Sun platforms can be managed in heterogeneous environments through the Managed Command Center for Unicenter.

Under the expanded relationship:

• CA's Unicenter NSM will provide increased support, such as load balancing and diagnostics, for the Solaris 10 OS through Sun's Solaris Container capabilities.
• Unicenter AutoSys Job Management will include support for scheduling applications running on the Solaris 10 OS for x86 platforms.
• Unicenter Database Management Solutions for Oracle and DB2 UDB distributed databases running on the Solaris 10 OS will provide database performance management and administration capabilities. CA's Unicenter Database Management Solutions for Distributed RDBMS are also being certified on the Solaris 10 OS.
• CA is extending support in BrightStor ARCserver Backup, BrightStor Resource manager, and BrightStor SAN Manager for the Sun StorEdge 6130 system. All three currently support the Solaris 10 OS and Sun StorEdge 6920 system.

CA is expected to launch Unicenter r11 at its user conference in Las Vegas. This major overhaul of the network management suite is designed to provide a common data repository and user interface, making it easier to manage storage and security under a single enterprise infrastructure.

The announcement was one of several from Sun's latest "town hall meeting" with reporters and analysts. Sun's EVP for software, John Loiacono, reported that the source code for OpenSolaris, released in June, is doing better than expected. More than 90,000 developers have signed up for the open-source program, he said. Most of the 40 contributions filed by those developers have been bug fixes, Loiacano said, but 12 have been integrated into the OS. The company has distributed more than three million registered licenses for Solaris 10 since the software became available on January 31, he said, and customers and partners continue to download the OS at a rate of about 80,000 licenses per week.

"The innovation in the Solaris 10 OS coupled with our decision to open source the code, has made it the best operating system running on AMD x64, Intel or SPARC processor-based systems," Loiacano said.

Sun is also set to announce a version of the Java Enterprise System (JES) for HP-UX and Windows 2000 Server. The JES is a suite of integrated enterprise network services software (identity services, Web and application services, communication services, portal services, and security and availability services). The system began shipping last week, Loiacono said, and support for Windows Server 2003 is coming in January. The JES currently supports Red Hat Linux and Solaris for SPARC and x64 processors.

The company also announced that IBM will soon support Solaris 10 for its blade servers running on x64 possessors.

The Solaris 10 OS is available as a free download here.