Sun Microsystems has announced significant updates to its Solaris Operating System (OS) and additional support for its 'military-grade' Trusted Solaris Operating System. In addition, Sun announced that its latest investments in the Solaris OS have resulted in performance improvements, increased security and new diagnostic capabilities.
This, combined with Sun's new commitment to provide the Solaris OS on the 32- and 64-bit AMD Opteron processor-based platform, means businesses have access to a globally supported, high performance and broadly adopted platform, running on SPARC, Intel and AMD Opteron processor-based systems.
"With our focus on delivering dramatic performance increases for low-end systems along with TCP/IP networking, improved security levels, and simple, effective virtualisation technologies, the Solaris OS is being established as the foundation for the Sun Java Enterprise System for SPARC and AMD Opteron processor-based systems." That's according to Tertius Bezuidenhout, national systems engineer manager at Sun Microsystems SA.
He adds that Sun is committed to delivering the very same functionality of the Solaris OS on its volume platforms - SPARC and x86 - which include the AMD Opteron processor, all at aggressive price points.
Features included in the latest Solaris OS distributions include:
* x86 performance optimisation: Improvements to Solaris x86 OS deliver higher throughput by taking advantage of the full capabilities of x86 platforms with extended instruction sets and higher bandwidth interconnects. Support has been added for the Streaming Instruction set (SSE2 and hyperthreading), which is expected to deliver improved video and audio streaming performance.
"Sun's internal tests show Java technology and application server performance on one to two CPU systems delivering performance increases over earlier versions of the Solaris OS," notes Bezuidenhout.
* Advancements in network performance: Today's high bandwidth networks place heavy demands on the operating system and on the processor. Sun has redesigned the networking code within the Solaris OS, to deliver dramatically higher network throughput with less processor load. The new version of the Solaris OS delivers from 20% to 47% better networking performance. Users benefit by getting improvements in networking infrastructure without purchasing additional hardware.
* Enhanced security: Microsoft recently announced that its "Longhorn" Windows Operating System would not be available until mid-2005, leaving its customers waiting for much-needed OS security enhancements. By applying the higher security protection of role-based access controls and fine grained privileges within the Solaris OS, systems administrators greatly diminish the risk of viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other malicious code that may find its way into the system. Solaris, already recognised as one of the industry's most secure operating systems, now includes features that enable systems administrators to have improved control of system security. For example, user and system processes are granted only the necessary access to operating system services and data they need to perform their tasks and no more.
* DTrace advanced tracing: The Solaris OS delivers a new tool that pervasively tracks and logs critical system and software activity on demand. This increases system administrator productivity and helps reduce downtime. The ability to dynamically "trace" every system process allows system administrators and developers to identify the bottlenecks in production systems and/or software applications, thereby dramatically speeding the time to resolution or optimisation, saving costs and improving service. Early use of DTrace has shown reductions in resolution time from several days to hours, or even minutes.
* Network File System version 4 (NFS v4): To save networking infrastructure costs, many IT groups wish to exploit the Internet for linking distant data centres. NFS v4 extends the benefits of file sharing by enabling secure access to files across the Internet. The Solaris OS implementation has a stronger security negotiation mechanism, enhanced extensibility capabilities and cross-platform interoperability over previous versions of Solaris.
These next generation features are delivered through Sun Software Express, Sun's early access program that provides subscribers with predictable monthly instalments of software code in advance of release and allows them to develop, test and optimise applications for faster time-to-market.
In addition, Sun has released the fifth update to the Solaris 9 OS for SPARC and x86 platforms. New features in the update release include secure provisioning and booting, and change management via the Internet. These features, paired with current capabilities such as Solaris Containers, make the Solaris 9 OS the first commercial Unix OS that can be booted remotely over the Internet without local network support. The Solaris 9 OS includes resource management capabilities built-in at no additional charge. The latest release also fully integrates the Sun Java Application Server 7 with the Solaris OS x86 and SPARC and includes the Java Virtual Machine, J2SE 1.4.2.
For more information on the Solaris OS, please visit http://www.sun.com/solaris.
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