600 improvements for Solaris 10 due by year-end, says Sun

The next generation of Sun Microsystems' Unix-based Solaris operating system, which includes over 600 new features, is scheduled for general release before the end of 2004.

Tertius Bezuidenhout, national systems engineer manager at Sun Microsystems SA, says the new release, Solaris 10, is the culmination of 20 years of research and development on one of the world's most widely used secure enterprise operating systems.

"The new features in Solaris 10 deliver breakthrough technologies that provide optimal system utilisation, relentless availability, unparalleled security and performance on multiple platforms, including Sun's new UltraSPARC and AMD Opteron systems," says Bezuidenhout.

Sun is adding improvements designed to give enterprises more system control, flexibility and diagnostics. "Such features and enhancements give systems administrators the ability to achieve higher levels of resource utilisation; specify the level of system control that individual users and administrators are allowed; contain viruses or intrusions; and improve the system's ability to diagnose and automatically repair problems," he adds.

Key among these features will be N1 Grid Containers (allowing 'pooling' of computing resources), predictive self-healing technologies and security enhancements.

"The Solaris Operating System and the Sun Java Enterprise System are at the core of the Internet, delivering unbeatable security and scalability for the most demanding customers around the globe." Furthermore, Solaris 10 delivers better Linux compatibility than any OS on the market.

"With the demise of HP/UX and AIX, Solaris 10 is very well timed to deliver low cost, high scale, high security, from 1-way developer systems to 100-way life-critical deployments," Bezuidenhout concludes.