SANTA CLARA, Calif., Dec. 4 -- Sun Microsystems Inc., today announced availability and pricing details for the Sun xVM Ops Center, a highly scalable datacenter automation tool for complete management of heterogeneous global IT environments. As part of the company's commitment to the open source community, Sun will also release the source code used to build Sun's xVM Ops Center to the OpenxVM.org community under the GNU General Public License version three (GPLv3).

Sun will provide ongoing code releases to OpenxVM.org, starting with the contribution of the Common Agent Container source code on Dec. 10. In addition, the first commercial release of Sun xVM Ops Center is expected to be available on Jan. 8.

A critical part of Sun's virtualization portfolio, Sun xVM Ops Center reduces datacenter management complexity by combining a range of lifecycle management functionality into an all-in-one tool. Sun xVM Ops Center helps simplify discovery, monitoring, operating system provisioning, comprehensive updates and patch management, firmware updates, and hardware management from power up to production in cross-platform Linux and Solaris Operating System-based x86 and SPARC environments. As a result, Sun xVM Ops Center allows enterprises to streamline their datacenter operations, helping to lower costs and more easily manage rapid growth, datacenter consolidation and compliance requirements.

"Business requirements that demand tremendous growth are creating more datacenter complexity, as administrators need to manage increasing volumes of data, applications and people on the network, as well as the rapid proliferation of servers and guest operating systems," said Steve Wilson, vice president of xVM for Sun Microsystems. "Through Sun xVM Ops Center's unique combination of asset discovery, inventory tracking, operating system provisioning, firmware updating and patch management capabilities, customers can automate a number of tasks on a global scale to improve their time to market and productivity to meet ever demanding service level agreements."

Designed to scale for demanding HPC and globally distributed IT environments, Sun xVM Ops Center helps customers to automate their datacenters and manage thousands of assets simultaneously. Through automated monitoring of assets on a network, and implementation of upgrades and patches for operating systems, Sun xVM Ops Center automates routine system administrator tasks in the datacenter. Sun xVM Ops Center addresses provisioning and update requirements to help improve predictability and keep Linux and Solaris instances current, thus improving the security and stability of systems. It gives the system administrator greater control to simulate updates and related dependencies before actually going forward with a change to enable more informed datacenter planning and minimize downtime.

A distribution of Sun xVM Ops Center will be made available via free download. Building on Sun's commitment to open standards and customer choice, Sun will continue to innovate the Sun xVM platform and collaborate with open source communities. The first of Sun's contributions will be the Common Agent Container (CAC) code to the OpenxVM.org community under GPLv3. The CAC is the heart of the management infrastructure for many of Sun's products, including the Sun xVM Ops Center. In addition, Sun plans to make the entire code base used by the xVM Ops Center available to the OpenxVM.org community in the first quarter of 2008.

Sun xVM is the company's open, comprehensive virtualization and management platform, which includes Sun xVM Ops Center and Sun xVM Server, an enterprise-grade bare-metal hypervisor. Sun has committed $2 billion in research and development for the xVM platform and Sun xVM Ops Center is the first product in the Sun xVM family of virtualization solutions to become available.

For more information on Sun xVM Ops Center, go to http://www.sun.com/xvmopscenter. For more information on Sun's virtualization solutions, go to www.sun.com/virtualization.

About Sun Microsystems Inc.

Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by a singular vision -- "The Network is the Computer" -- Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com.