"The impact of the PostgreSQL announcement is significant, in my opinion, in that it gives Sun a credible database option to augment their existing software stack," said Stephen O'Grady, senior analyst at RedMonk, in an e-mail. "PostgreSQL gets less attention than does MySQL, but is a very credible open source database and one that has shown signs of increasing popularity of late."

ZFS, meanwhile, will be broadly available in Solaris in the first half of 2006 but is available for the OpenSolaris community now. Sun officials stressed that its 128-bit support represents a volume that will never be exceeded. Automated administration also is featured.

"It is designed to be much easier to use file system from an administrative perspective," said Glenn Weinberg, vice president of the operations platform group at Sun.

"The release of ZFS to the OpenSolaris project is significant in that the file system offers some features that are not available elsewhere," O'Grady said. "It won't change the landscape overnight, as file systems typically have to prove themselvesin a variety of deployment scenarios before they can be considered for production usage, but it's certainly compelling technically."

The Sun Containers for Linux Applications technology enables Red Hat applications to run unmodified on Solaris. This enables consolidation of multiple environments onto a single platform, according to Sun. This technology will be added to OpenSolaris by the end of this year.