Sun is making a major push into the developing market for Linux and Open Source products.

The Santa clara, Calif.-based concern is rolling out seven Sun ONE products for Linux as the company expands into the x86 server marketplace. The new products include the Sun ONE Application Server 7 and Sun ONE Directory Server 5.1 on Linux. Sun said it expanded its product line for Linux from two to seven in the past six months.

Sun's Grid Engine Portal portlet technology integrates Sun ONE Grid Engine software with SUN ONE Portal Server technology, and the company says it will contribute the technologies to the Open Source Grid Engine Project. Sun hopes its Grid Engine Portal technology will enable commercial entities and research institutions to gain secure access to grid-based collaborative computing environments.

Sun also said it is working on a number of new Linux-based products expected to hit the market within the next year. Those products include Sun ONE Portal Server, Sun ONE Identity Server, Sun ONE Calendar Server and Sun ONE Messaging Server.

Sun is also announcing its "Mad Hatter," desktop product, which is scheduled to go into beta this spring and could be available as soon as this summer. Sun says it plans to integrate the Linux desktop with a new client solution that it claims "eliminates the expense of traditional desktops, while significantly bolstering security and authentication."

In other Sun news, the University of Tokyo says it will deploy Sun's Fire 15K supercluster servers for Japan's largest genome analysis system. The servers will be 788 UltraSPARC III processors and will contain approximately 1.7 terabytes of memory. The deployment at the University of Tokyo's Human Genome Center is the second largest Sun Fire 15K supercluster in the world.


Dell Delivers on Blade Server Promise
Intel Offers Testing Tools for Linux