http://blogs.zdnet.com

This may be the last CommunityOne event for Sun as an independent company, and if it is the company is going out with an open source bang.

Sun is putting everything it has into the new version of Open Solaris, dubbed 2009.06, and promising once again to unify the open source and paid versions of the operating system.

Director of product management Dan Roberts gave ZDNet a preview. The highlights are:

* Project Crossbow, which puts networking into the operating system stack and reduces the need for networking hardware.
* Project COMSTAR, allowing centralized management of storage, turning commodity servers into storage servers and moving the data used most often onto flash drives.
* Virtualization built into the operating system, so that hypervisors like Xen can be run as containers.

Roberts said Sun is also reducing the cost of its Open Solaris support contracts, and unifying those prices with those of Solaris. There will now be three tiers of support — $324 for basic, $720 for standard and $1,080 for premium.

“That gives existing Solaris customers the option of running a collection of Solaris and Open Solaris under the same contract because there’s no price difference,” Roberts said.

Putting networking, storage management and virtualization inside the operating system kernel of a scaled, enterprise-class operating system is going to be a very big deal, Roberts added.

The moves seem aimed squarely at Sun’s newest rival in the hardware space, Cisco Systems. By putting controls normally associated with Cisco networking inside the Open Solaris kernel Sun hits Cisco where it lives. Or Oracle does.

Where Sun will be living in a few months is another story.