Sun Microsystems Inc. last week rolled out two new commercial versions of the Trusted Solaris operating system for the x86 platform. The decision to make Trusted Solaris available on Intel-based servers is part of a larger overall strategy to renew the company’s commitment to the Unix-based OS on that platform.
Sun Rolls Out Trusted Solaris for x86
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Taking into consideration Sun’s earlier stance on Solaris x86 this is an interesting development. I am curious about hardware though, because to get an EAL4 Solaris x86 would be evaluated on specific hardware. That information is not on Sun’s site, nor is it available on the Common Criteria web site (although Solaris 8 (both Sparc and Intel) and Trusted Solaris 8 for Sparc is).
Reading the .pdf on Common Criteria’s web site they used Dell hardware during the evaluation of Solaris x86 (not trusted). I wonder if the hardware requirements for Trusted Solaris x86 are going to be stricter than before.
I am sure that the cost ($2,495.00 for a single processor system) will be a major stumbling block for many. And this cost escalates as the number of processors increase, regarless of platform.
This could be part of Sun’s push into Blade servers to work with N1 as part of a trusted environment. I would like to know who actually buys Trusted Solaris, because I have never seen it despite working in “classified” Government environments?
I was reading Asian Wall Street Journal yesterday and read about Trusted Solaris and they were selling it aggresively at $999, cheap enough to replace a Win2k Server, but I’m not sure if it would also run on x86, unlike Solaris 9, which is available for $20 (download).
Has Sun flipped? Why on earth would one call an x86 box trusted? There is no way I would trust a toy computer to any data that belongs on a real computer. This is worse than jumbo shrimp. This is really dangerous. Next thing you know some stupid will put your heart machine on an x86 and you might just crash. More that half the crashs are hardware related so what good is a trusted OS?
What has the hardware platform got to do with it?