Sun Microsystems will make its Solaris clustering code available to the open-source community - the latest effort in the company's OpenSolaris project.

Sun will remove the lock-and-key for its Open High Availability Cluster package in three stages over the next 18 months. The first release, which is out now, delivers code for most of the high availability agents offered with the Solaris Cluster product.

Sun has made code available for the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) and 24 agents that have already been created for Solaris databases — along with documentation to assist in the creation of new ones. The agents released include Solaris Containers agent, the BEA Weblogic agent, and PostgreSQL.

In the second phase which is planned for November, Sun will release extensions to the core clustering code. Highlighting the release will be multisite disaster recovery software, the Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition.

At the end of the 18 month period, Sun will pull the covers off the Solaris kernel modules and core pieces of Solaris cluster such as infrastructure and UI bits.

The code will be available under Sun's own open-source Common Development and Distribution License (CCDL) rather than under the GNU general public license like the company did with Java.

Sun said the Open HA Cluster releases will make over 2 million lines of code available — in addition to the 10 million lines of Solaris already open-sourced.

You can see a complete list of the HA agents offered in the product here (http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/ha-clusters/). ®

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