Sun Microsystems is today unveiling a new edition of OpenSolaris tooled to data center deployment, along with plans with Toshiba to roll out a line of at least two laptops which will run the open source operating system.

With a set of announcements today, Sun Microsystems is moving its open source OpenSolaris operating system in directions ranging from large data centers to Toshiba laptops, according to Charlie Boyle, director of Solaris marketing.

Since releasing the first edition of OpenSolaris some six months ago, Sun has been working with students and other developers to "build out the ecosystem" for OpenSolaris, Boyle said, in a briefing for BetaNews.

As a result, OpenSolaris 2008.11, a release available free of charge today, brings major innovations in a couple of areas, according to Boyle. "We've seen a number of customers start to deploy OpenSolaris in production, so we've added new functionality for the data center. We've also given OpenSolaris a new, more approachable graphical user interface," BetaNews was told.

Beyond releasing OpenSolaris 2008.11 today, Sun is also rolling out plans with Toshiba for a family of laptops that will run the open source OS. Although pricing and other specific details won't be ready until closer to the time of shipment early next year, Boyle told BetaNews that the OpenSolaris laptops "won't all be at the super high-end."

The notebook PCs will range from at least one offering for "power users" to "an ultra portable type of set-up," he elaborated.

As a key enhancement on the GUI side, OpenSolaris incorporates a feature called Time Slider, an enhancement aimed at making the capabilities of Sun's ZFS file system "relevant" to end users, he said.

With Time Slider, you can take instant snapshots of your software configurations, making it possible to roll your PC back to a specific time in the past. "You can see what was in the directory then -- and if you accidentally deleted a file, for example, what happened to it," Boyle explained.

On the data center side, new capabilities include an Automated Installer application; Distro Constructor, for creating and deploying custom OS images across OpenSolaris systems; and the COMSTAR Storage Framework, for creating an open storage server with OpenSolaris.

Boyle also told BetaNews that the new release of the OS has been "optimized" for Intel's latest Nehalem Core microarchitecture, with provisions for the QuickPath Interconnect on-board memory controller, hyperthreading, and hardware-based virtualization support.