What is the benefit of binary evolution?

The evolution of the Internet has significantly influenced the way businesses and solution providers look at the IT industry. Companies are now demanding solutions that can run throughout their organisations while enabling Internet users to access it from any IP-enabled device.

Binary compatible solutions are now the order of the day - deploying stacks of software just doesn't cut it anymore.

Sun Microsystems' Solaris Operating Environment (OE) supports binary compatibility across the company's product line.

This means that any service, once compiled, runs on Solaris, from entry-level workstations to the 106-processor Sun Fire 15K, offering unprecedented flexibility in deploying services as well as lowered total cost of ownership.

Says Tertius Bezuidenhout, national SE manager at Sun Microsystems SA: "We are one of only a few vendors that offer a single OE throughout our product range - an approach that has a significant number of benefits.

"Solaris' support for binary compatibility enables companies to develop solutions in-house on smaller servers and then deploy them on more powerful servers. Time to market is also increased, as it takes the same amount of time to deploy Solaris on high-end servers as it takes on desktops."

Companies can also scale their services horizontally (by adding more servers) or vertically (by adding more computing resources to a single server) without having to worry whether their application software will run.

Skills investment is reduced as Solaris can be deployed and managed throughout an enterprise, and there is no need for multiple OEs to be maintained.

"Solaris is designed in a modular fashion, so it can adapt to new platforms, incorporate new features and change configurations without the need for rebooting," he comments. "It offers linear scalability from the desktop to the datacentre."

This is in contrast with other IT vendor offerings, where moving up the product range means changing server architectures and OEs - all costly propositions while customers are demanding increasingly higher levels of service.