Features & Functions

Application migration services.

Tools and services from Sun and its partners can help you analyze or migrate your applications to Sun systems. Application migration services include migration TCO justification, consultation, and assessment and application services.

Maintain your current business functionality and protect investments in existing business applications while transitioning to a future-proof platform of Solaris Operating System.

iForce Competency Centers.

iForce Competency Centers provide sizing and testing services, system requirements planning, technical architecture reviews, and proof-of-concept implementations.

You can speed and simplify the application migration process by leveraging the expertise of Sun iForce partners and the resources of iForce Competency Centers.

Trade-in promotions on HP AlphaServer products.

Under the Sun Upgrade Advantage Program, Sun offers a double trade-in value for HP AlphaServer products that can be applied toward the purchase of a new Sun Fire server.

The promotional trade-in offer helps lower acqusition costs, so funds can be allocated to migration services, ongoing maintenance, or additional hardware procurement.

Leasing and financing options.

Sun provides a variety of leasing and financing options to help manage the costs of acquiring new Sun servers and equipment.

Choose systems that are right for your business needs with a financing plan that helps you fit equipment acquisition costs within your budget.

Capacity on Demand (COD) 2.0 purchasing option.

Customers can configure Sun Fire 4800-15K servers with additional COD CPU/memory boards and activate those resources at any time by purchasing a COD RTU license.

Pay for additional computing power only when you need it, lowering the up-front cost of new Sun Fire servers. The COD 2.0 purchasing option provides immediate access to additional system capacity with no disruption to operations.

Integrated software.

Solaris Operating System integrates applications such as Sun Java Directory Server, Sun Java Application Server, SunScreen 3.2 firewall software, and Solaris Resource Manager with IP Quality of Service.

Save on recurring licensing fees and host your applications on a modern software infrastructure based on open standards. Integrated software helps drive down cost of operations for software acquisition, integration, and testing.

Sun Cluster software.

Sun Cluster software delivers high levels of application availability with functionality that is equivalent to HP TruCluster, including auto fault detection, failover, and load balancing.

Sun Cluster software can help you maintain a highly available application environment and has a clear, long-term roadmap of support and technology enhancements.

Application Binary Compatibility Guarantee.

Sun guarantees that applications running on current versions of Solaris Operating System will continue to run on future versions of the operating system.

The application binary compatibility guarantee provides long-term investment protection for your software infrastructure.

SPARC/Solaris roadmap.

Sun is committed to future development of the Solaris Operating System and the SPARC microprocessor architecture.

You can migrate once to Sun's SPARC/Solaris platform and rest assured that you will have new generations of Sun technologies to choose from in the years to come.

Sun server scalability.

Sun's server portfolio provides the ability to scale from uniprocessor designs to systems with more than a hundred CPUs. Across two architectures and three operating systems, application compatibility is facilitated with no more than a recompilation operation.

With an ability to scale horizontally with Sun entry-level systems and vertically with its midrange and high-end servers, customers can add to, consolidate, and respond to evolving computing needs without worrying about changing architectures, applications, training curriculums, end-user comfort levels, or support processes.

Independent software vendor (ISV) support for Solaris Operating System.

Solaris Operating System is enthusiastically supported by ISVs, with more than 14,000 commercial applications currently available.

You can select best-of-breed applications with the latest functionality and implement new services to meet future business needs.

Solaris Operating System.

The industry-leading 64-bit UNIX operating system offers reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features such as Dynamic Reconfiguration, Dynamic System Domains, Solaris Containers, and built-in security. It offers near-linear scalability to 106 CPUs.

Solaris Operating System provides a secure foundation for mission-critical applications and the capability to reallocate system resources on demand, so your IT infrastructure can scale to meet growing service requirements.

Solaris Containers Enable customers to increase hardware utilization up to 4x through workload and application consolidation.

Solaris Containers consist of Solaris Zones (the ability to create unique, virtualized instances of the OS) and the Solaris Resource Manager (the ability to assign portions of processing power to particular zones as well as set dynamic limits). This unique combination means that Solaris Containers can be used to create multiple computing platforms on a single system that are fault-,security-, and resource-isolated.

By consolidating multiple workloads from multiple servers on to a single server, customers can see measurable cost savings by increasing system utilization, minimizing hardware costs, and minimizing administrative costs since only one OS needs to be administered. Additional savings are realized by reducing demands on system administrators during routine system maintenance.

Predictive Self-Healing Enables Solaris systems to accurately predict component failures and mitigate many serious problems before they occur, thus significantly improving uptime.

Predictive Self-Healing has two components: the Solaris Fault Manager and Service Manager. Together, they prevent and mitigate hardware problems as well as enable automatic recovery from many system errors.

Improved system and service availability through proactive diagnosis and isolation of faulty components

- Automated diagnosis and restart of components and services happens automatically in milliseconds rather than hours or days

- Simplified administration model for managing services significantly reduces cost of ownership

Dynamic Tracing (DTrace)
A unique and innovative new system capability delivering comprehensive top-to-bottom system observability for troubleshooting and performance enhancement.

DTrace combines a huge number of trace points (over a hundred thousand on many systems) with an powerful scripting language (the "D" language) and a simple, interactive command-line interface. DTrace works by dynamically instrumenting the operating system kernel and applications with trace points that are completely passive until enabled. They can be enabled very quickly for data collection and then disabled again to minimize performance impacts on the machine being examined.

Dramatically reduces time to identify and resolve system and application performance problems from days to minutes.

- Delivers accurate and precise information without requiring system changes or application changes.

- Designed for use on production systems to reduce diagnosis time for system and application problems.