Sun Developer Journal

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced the availability of the Solaris 10 10/09 Operating System (OS). The Solaris 10 OS has been extended with new performance and power efficiency enhancements, more streamlined management of system installations, updates and fixes, new updates for Solaris(TM) ZFS and advancements to further leverage the functionality of the latest SPARC(R) and x86 based systems.

Solaris 10 10/09 provides new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install manner, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications, including Oracle database and application software. With over two decades of Sun/Oracle collaboration, there are more Oracle database deployments on the SPARC/Solaris combination than any other OS and Sun is leading the way to bring high-performance solutions for the entire range of Oracle products.

Solaris 10 10/09 also leverages the innovation and contributions of the OpenSolaris(TM) community, including investments by third-party companies such as Intel and AMD, to add more capabilities to Solaris 10's award-winning portfolio of enterprise features. This release also builds on Solaris' proven track record as a highly secure deployment platform, including enterprise-grade security features such as Solaris Trusted Extensions, and support for the built-in cryptographic acceleration features of Sun's UltraSPARC(R) CMT processors.

“Sun continues to add significant capabilities to the Solaris OS, delivering sophisticated power management and performance for the datacenter and helping our customers protect their business continuity,” said Jim McHugh, vice president, Datacenter Marketing, Sun Microsystems. “With Solaris 10 10/09, installation, update and patch features have been enhanced to simplify system administration and reduce cost. In addition, Solaris ZFS has been updated to integrate Flash technology, the next revolution in storage hardware, into the operating system. Solaris provides customers with a greater degree of flexibility, while its new features deliver the best performance and power efficiency on systems using the latest SPARC, Intel and AMD processors.”

Streamlined Management of System Installations, Updates and Fixes

Solaris 10 10/09 helps to increase business efficiency by simplifying the management of consolidated systems and provides several new features to help streamline the upgrade and patching process, especially on systems deploying large numbers of Solaris Containers. Solaris Containers gives customers built-in virtualization at no additional cost with low overhead. Solaris 10 now provides a new automated framework for installing patches in single user mode, parallel patch installation of virtualized Solaris Containers, and significant speedups for SVR4 package installation, allowing system installations or upgrades to be up to four times faster than before.

Sun's innovative Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 Containers also make it easy for customers running older Sun systems to take advantage of new hardware upgrades, with a “P2V” (Physical to Virtual) method of moving intact environments into virtual containers on Solaris 10. As a result, customers can quickly and easily move existing physical environments to virtual containers on Solaris 10 and take advantage of the performance, scale and cost savings of new SPARC-based servers.

These improvements in consolidation management add to Sun's platform leadership and the built-in virtualization features of the Solaris OS, which include: Logical Domains for running multiple Solaris guests on Solaris SPARC CMT systems; Solaris Containers, which allow up to thousands of isolated application guests in a single Solaris instance; and a comprehensive approach to networking and storage virtualization for easy deployment in real world environments. Solaris Containers are also the foundation of Solaris Trusted Extensions, part of the comprehensive enterprise-grade integrated security features of the Solaris OS.

New Updates to Solaris ZFS

Solaris ZFS, included with the Solaris OS, eliminates the need for customers to purchase and maintain a separate file system or volume manager to obtain enterprise-class data features. The latest release of Solaris ZFS in Solaris 10 10/09 integrates the ability to use solid-state Flash drive technology for data caching and high volume transactional applications, delivering an optimized combination of performance and cost effectiveness. In addition, Solaris ZFS now allows administrators greater flexibility in setting usage limits in several ways, including by individual file system, user or group.

Support for Next Generation Processors

The combination of the Solaris OS and the latest SPARC, Intel, and AMD processor generations deliver the scalability, performance, power efficiency and reliability demanded in today's enterprise datacenter Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multi-core/processor/thread systems and enables industry-leading performance and scalability on the latest CPUs.

Sun and Intel have also enhanced Solaris power management capabilities to leverage the advanced power states of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, boosting energy efficiency by adjusting processor power on-demand in response to system utilization. The Solaris Power Aware Dispatcher automatically monitors and optimizes a company's system to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption and can utilize Intel's Deep C-States technology to dramatically reduce power consumed by idle cores.

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