Sun Donates High Availability Cluster Code to the Open Source Community

Sun Microsystems announced it will release the Solaris Cluster source code through the HA (High Availability) Clusters community on the OpenSolaris site. Sun is releasing the Open High Availability Cluster in response to interest and feedback from the OpenSolaris community. For the first time, developers will be able to participate in the evolution of the software itself, as well as leverage the open source cluster technology to develop and support highly available application services.

"Sun is releasing this code to the community to accelerate innovation around clustered solutions, in a world moving quickly to scale-out architectures. When applied to Solaris or other technologies, the Solaris clustering code is a great base to support clustered and HA systems innovation throughout the community," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The Open HA Cluster code allows open source developers to use the same Solaris HA infrastructure that powers enterprises' most mission critical applications with their open source and network facing applications and services."

Sun's first contributions are application modules, or agents, which enable open source or commercially available applications to become highly available in a cluster environment.

The Open HA Cluster code will be made available in three phases, beginning at the end of June and continuing over the next 18 months. In the first phase of Open HA Cluster, Sun will deliver code for most of the high availability agents offered with the Solaris Cluster product. Solaris Cluster's high availability agents allow developers to cluster-enable applications to run as either scalable or failover services. Sun is also making available the source code for the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) along with agent related documentation, to assist in testing new agents. The test framework and first test suite will be contributed at the end of June 2007. Among these agents are the Solaris Containers agent, the BEA Weblogic agent, and PostgreSQL.

Agents written using Open HA Cluster will also run on Solaris Cluster version 3.2 on the Solaris 10 OS. Subsequent phases of Open HA Cluster will include delivery of the code for the recently released Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition - software that enables multi-site disaster recovery by managing the availability of application services and data across geographically dispersed clusters. Later, Sun will release the code for the core Solaris Cluster infrastructure, again with SCATE infrastructure tests and documentation.

To learn more about Open High Availability Cluster and the HA Clusters community on OpenSolaris, and to review a complete list of the high availability agents offered with the Solaris Cluster product, please visit: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ha-clusters/

In the two years since Sun first opened the source code of the Solaris software development build, the OpenSolaris project community has grown worldwide. More about the achievements of the OpenSolaris community can be found at http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/opensolaris_at_two

Sun offers a tiered set of support services for its software offerings, ranging from single incident to comprehensive developer plans. In addition, with a broad portfolio of training and certification offerings, developers can enhance their skillsets to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies. To learn more, please visit http://developers.sun.com/services