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Moon Macrosystems - How to build a better Sun

Go ahead. Take a crack at it

The software is the easy part

I have said time and again that Solaris is the secret sauce that has made Sun what it is, and that is as true today as it was a decade ago - or even two decades ago when it was called SunOS. Lucky for you, Mooners, Jonathan Schwartz has cut your new company a break by taking all of that Solaris software stack open source. (One could argue that open sourcing that software made Sun less valuable even as it made Sun more relevant in a Linux-friendly data center environment. It also made some customers feel a little more comfortable, since the Sun software stack can - and will - outlive the company, no matter what happens to it).

For phase one of Moon Macrosystems, all you gotta do is download the code from Sun's open source projects, start up a Moon.org project site, rip out the Sun or other project logos and replace them with a set of Moon Macrosystems logos for the newly rechristened software products. Now you have a software stack. It might look a little something like this:

  • Lunaris - operating system (formerly known as Solaris).
  • Loonaris - open source development version of Lunaris (and you're crazy if you put it into production)
  • Dark Side - integrated file system (ZFS, and so named because file systems should be invisible)
  • Armstrong - Trusted Lunaris Security Extensions, of course
  • Buzz - application development language (Java)
  • Craters - server virtualization (VirtualBox or Xen or Containers or LDoms - pick one. Really, pick one. And if you can't bring yourself to pick just one, pick no more three or four. Okay, five if you really must have vSphere. If you say Hyper-V, you're fired).
  • Maria - integrated relational database (could be MySQL, but let's get a better storage engine than InnoDB that can handle all the threads in modern iron, please. Alright. Forget MySQL. Maybe just go to EnterpriseDB and use its version of PostgreSQL and use its Oracle compatibility layer to kick Oracle in the ass).
  • Regolith - application server (GlassFish)
  • Lunar Eclipse - forget NetBeans and just use Eclipse like everyone else for an application development framework. Put the Sun Studio compilers in here and get the Mono C# runtime environment in there as well as a PHP engine.
  • Houston - system monitoring and management tools (a mix of DTrace and xVM Ops Center and the other systems management tools Sun has cooked up over the years)
  • Full Moon - high availability clustering. No branding changes needed here (funny, that)
  • Werewolf - MPI parallel supercomputer clustering
  • Lustre - parallel clustered file system for supercomputing, running on Lunaris
  • Blue Moon - integrated hierarchical storage management (doesn't existed in Solaris (as far as I know) when using ZFS. But SamFS certainly was an HSM, and this kind of functionality is needed to stage data from tape and disk to flash and main memory automagically)

That is by no means an exhaustive list, but you get the idea. That was the simple part with the software stack. Now comes the hard part. The Lunaris operating system and all of these parts have to be tightly integrated and supported as a single stack. That means a set of user interface screens with a consistent look and feel so you don't drive system administrators mad. It also means that the entire stack has to be fitted to take advantage of all of the features in Lunaris. So the xVM Xen hypervisor has to be DTraceable, like the rest of the stack, for instance.

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