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The company said yesterday that it will distribute and support the open source PostgresSQL database - a decisive move for the company that has such strong ties to Oracle. Execs said that the move was a response to customer demand and places Solaris 10 as a key platform for hosting high-performance, mission-critical database solutions.

It will immediately begin work with the PostgresSQL community to integrate it into the Solaris platform, including use with Solaris Containers, Predictive Self-Healing and Dynamic Tracing - DTrace - technologies. Sun will also include PostgresSQL within its global round the clock support.

'We continue to redefine how people think of the operating system,' said John Loiacono, executive vice president of Software for Sun. 'I don't see how any vendor can survive long term without offering a full spectrum of services - ranging from the file system, networking, management, virtualization, observability, provisioning

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and database, widely available and open source.'

Sun is also putting more components of its Solaris 10 platform into the OpenSolaris community. This includes Solaris Containers, which can run Red Hat binaries seamlessly including commercial and in-house applications.

The Solaris ZFS file system is also going over to the OpenSolaris community. As well as self-managinig error correction capabilities, one of its main selling points is built-in storage virtualisation and management that does away with complex volume management.

Sun also announced its involvement with the open source Xen virtualisation project. Virtualisation allows an organisation to use its hardware resources more efficiently, pooling that power to run any number of discrete, virtualised servers and applications.

Sun is not the only company looking at virtualisation. Red Hat, too, is working with the Xen project on virtualisation products of its own. Microsoft released a major update to its Virtual Server 2005 last week at IT Forum in Barcelona with native 64-bit application support.

Solaris 10 is itself open source, under Sun's own OSI-approved CDDL license. The platform is supported through the OpenSolaris project, where new technologies are first developed and then integrated into the commercial version. Sun makes it money from support contracts, offering bug-fixes, update support and other services. It claims that there are already 3.3m licences for the platform and its OpenSolaris has nearly 10,000 members.