Nexenta, Can you say SolaBuntu
Found on FODD Blog on Friday, 21 November 2008
Solaris has a pretty decent record in the data-center. It is a solid and widely trusted paltform, however, it was showing its age pretty badly. Many of the most commonly used tools were outdated.
OpenSolaris has been started to fix some of those issues, however, nexneta takes this concept to an extreme. It basically takes the ubuntu userland and plugs underneath it an opensolaris kernel. Nexenta also integrates unique solaris features such as zfs with ubuntu tools like apt-get to provide system wide transactional safe upgrades.
Why someone would mix Solaris and Ubuntu is beyond me. Basically it's a try to merge two license schemes, the GPL and CDDL, into something new. The licenses make it basically impossible to simply put something from Solaris into Linux (GPL zealots will argue it's essentially important that every bit is GPL, but for the average user this is sometimes hard to understand). Anyway, if you want the sweets, like ZFS, use (and learn) OpenSolaris. I wouldn't want to entrust my data to a mixture which, theoretically, includes the funny problems from two different upstreams.