Appliances

Welcome to the OpenSolaris Appliances Community!

Solaris is no stranger to the world of appliances and has much to offer in this space. It has often been deployed as a key component in servers providing dedicated services (e.g. routing, firewall, naming, mail, web, media, storage, etc). Indeed, many businesses have been built around packaged solutions where Solaris plays a central role behind the scenes.

Building useful appliances is about hiding complexity. The OpenSolaris Appliance Community exists to sift the enormous configuration permutations of hardware, application software and OpenSolaris itself, to provide low cost, feature rich appliances for all (especially for the home and the small office).

Want to build a reliable NAS server for your collection of photos, movies and music? Want it backed up and secure? Want to build a robust firewall router with QoS capabilities? Want to build a mail server for your favourite charity? What to setup a mail server for your local school? Want to build your own TiVo? Want to know how to get OpenSolaris doing something really useful on the latest and greatest (or smallest) PC motherboard? ... Then you've come to the right place, and we hope that you'll stick around!

Community Goals

• Establish an active community building diverse appliances using OpenSolaris
• Build a community of developers focused on making such appliances a reality
• Form projects to develop tried and trusted recipes for building specific appliances
• Leverage and aid the work of other OpenSolaris communities for better appliances
• Have confidence in recommending OpenSolaris appliances to your friends and family
• Low cost NAS appliances ... and freedom .. and so much more ... for all!

Let's make it happen!

Network Appliances

There are many projects at Sun and in the open source community that have a lot of potential for use in the world of network appliances.  To bring together information on these projects, that could be considered relevant, a new web page has been added to the appliances community - Network Appliance Projects.

Embedded Appliances

Embedded appliances are a step away from the system that you typically find running Open/Solaris today. Instead of a fast CPU with gigabytes of RAM and disk space, an embedded device might be lucky to be 1GHz with 1GB of RAM and use a non-mainstream CPU. Embedded appliances require a completely new approach to installation and patching.

Projects

• Velitium Embedded Kit for OpenSolaris