"Sun is releasing this code to the community to accelerate innovation around clustered solutions, in a world moving quickly to scale-out architectures. When applied to Solaris or other technologies, the Solaris clustering code is a great base to support clustered and HA systems innovation throughout the community," said Rich Green, executive vice president, Software, Sun Microsystems, Inc. "The Open HA Cluster code allows open source developers to use the same Solaris HA infrastructure that powers enterprises' most mission critical applications with their open source and network facing applications and services."

Sun's first contributions are application modules, or agents, which enable open source or commercially available applications to become highly available in a cluster environment.

The Open HA Cluster code will be made available in three phases, beginning at the end of June and continuing over the next 18 months. In the first phase of Open HA Cluster, Sun will deliver code for most of the high availability agents offered with the Solaris Cluster product. Solaris Cluster's high availability agents allow developers to cluster-enable applications to run as either scalable or failover services. Sun is also making available the source code for the Solaris Cluster Automated Test Environment (SCATE) along with agent related documentation, to assist in testing new agents. The test framework and first test suite will be contributed at the end of June 2007. Among these agents are the Solaris Containers agent, the BEA Weblogic agent, and PostgreSQL.