EveryCity Managed Hosting Sponsors OpenIndiana

London, United Kingdom, October 01, 2010 --(PR.com)-- EveryCity Managed Hosting sponsors OpenIndiana

Managed hosting provider EveryCity is supporting OpenIndiana, a new open-source operating system that is a fork of OpenSolaris, Oracle’s recently discontinued operating system. OpenIndiana was launched in London on Tuesday 14th September 2010 to an enthusiastic response.

EveryCity, who provide Solaris hosting on their cloud platform, were quick to fill the gap left by the withdrawal of OpenSolaris from the market. Oracle, who took over Sun Microsystems in 2009, are switching to a more closed development model to focus on their commercial paid for operating system, Solaris 11. OpenIndiana provides the community with a much desired free alternative, and is constructed via an open community process.

The OpenIndiana project was created earlier this year by the Managing Director of EveryCity, Alasdair Lumsden, and EveryCity have committed to providing sponsorship by way of bandwidth and hosting capacity on their cloud platform, relieving one of the greatest cost burdens for the project.

Community developers worked quickly to create the first release of OpenIndiana, which saw well over 4,000 downloads of the first development ISO over the first few days following release. It is a drop-in replacement for the official Oracle OpenSolaris and forthcoming Solaris 11 distributions. It aims to provide regular development builds, plus a forthcoming stable release with bug and security fixes provided free of charge.

Alasdair Lumsden explains "OpenIndiana is about gaining independence and security, whilst cooperating and sharing our efforts with Oracle to benefit the greater OpenSolaris community. OpenIndiana is built by the community for the community and we are actively looking for OpenSolaris users to get involved. We intend to foster a friendly, open and active environment for developers to join us, to develop the operating system in new directions and take it to levels that were simply not possible under Sun/Oracle's stewardship.

"We believe OpenSolaris excels as a server platform, with enterprise features found in no other operating system, such as the ZFS filesystem, Zones, the Service Management Framework, the Fault Management system, the COMSTAR iSCSI/FCoE framework, and the Crossbow virtualised network stack. Combined with bug and security fixes, our stable branch will provide one of the best free server operating systems available on the market."

OpenIndiana is a member of the recently created Illumos Foundation, a project that aims to deliver open source replacements for closed source binaries in OpenSolaris, whilst retaining binary compatibility.

OpenIndiana also plans to enhance the system's ease of use, making it even easier for Linux users to gain the benefits of OpenIndiana with as little pain as possible. Key to achieving this includes making more third party software available as ready to install software packages, working with 3rd party software projects so they compile out of the box on Solaris, and providing excellent, easy to understand documentation.

Current Status

The first development release, oi_147, is now available for download. It is available in 3 download formats - a Live DVD with a graphical installer which installs a full desktop environment, a Text installer CD which installs a minimal server install, and the Automated Installer CD which allows performing a custom install via XML files.

It is also possible to upgrade your OpenSolaris install to OpenIndiana via the IPS PKG system.

OpenIndiana are keen to stress that this is a brand new project and as such, still in active development. The initial development builds are subject to rapid change and may have major bugs or issues. Project participants urge early adopters not to report these in the bug tracker, but stay tuned for the soon to follow stable branch.

Bullet Point Summary:

- Website at: http://openindiana.org/
- Drop in replacement for OpenSolaris
- Drop in replacement for Solaris 11
- Live ISO from our development branch now available
- Stable branch to follow soon
- Intends to use the Illumos project in a future release, so closed source binaries are replaced with open ones
- Community governed and run - not affiliated with Oracle
- Stable branch to be a production-ready OS with security updates & bug fixes
- CDDL/BSD/MIT Licensed
- x86 Architecture only at present, SPARC to follow at a later date
- Actively looking for community members to get involved
- Website: http://openindiana.org
- Mailing Lists: http://openindiana.org/mailman
- Wiki: http://wiki.openindiana.org
- IRC Channel: #openindiana on irc.freenode.net

OpenIndiana is based on OpenSolaris. Solaris, OpenSolaris and ZFS are trademarks of Oracle Corporation.

EveryCity is a UK based Managed Hosting provider specialising in Cloud technologies and high availability solutions.

OpenIndiana is a community continuation of the OpenSolaris operating system, and aims to become the defacto Solaris based distribution installed on production servers where security and bug fixes are required free of charge.

For further information contact Jon Slater at js@everycity.co.uk or on +44 (0)20 7183 2804 or +44 (0)7810 634521.

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