"In terms of standing a chance against LAMP, absolutely, I think it's a very strong offering," Mann said.

But Sun faces an obstacle in that Solaris still is considered by some to be a proprietary Unix variant, even if that is not true anymore, Mann said. "It's going to be difficult just to get mind share over Linux," he said.

Users of Solaris + AMP also can avail themselves to Sun's Try and Buy program, in which customers can try out Sun hardware for 60 days.

Sun also plans to unveil Solaris Express, Developer Edition on Tuesday. "It's a new distribution of OpenSolaris specifically targeted at developers on x86 or x64 workstations or Intel AMD-based laptops and workstations," Roberts said. Developers can use the OpenSolaris distribution to build applications that would then be deployed on Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris.

"It's just like [how] a Windows developer can deploy a solution that runs on Linux." Roberts said.