Oracle's sometimes best friend Sun Microsystems is going to distribute and support the open source Postgres database 24x7 with Solaris 10. Sun didn't say so until after Oracle named Solaris its preferred 64-bit open source development and deployment environment.

Sun will start distributing Postgres this month and integrate it into Solaris in the first half of next year.

At the same time Sun said it was going to integrate a "revolutionary" new 128-bit file system called Solaris ZFS that's supposed to have "unprecedented" error detection and correction capabilities into OpenSolaris and integrate Solaris Containers for Linux Applications into OpenSolaris so it can run Red Hat applications unmodified.

Sun just released the ZFS code to OpenSolaris the other day.

Sun is also going with Xen virtualization and supporting Xen provisioning with its N1 System Manager.

Sun claims 3.3 million licenses for Solaris 10 and says the OpenSolaris community now boasts nearly 10,000 members.

(This report appeared originally at www.clientservernews.com.)