Feature Story

By Lisa DiCarlo

September 11, 2007 -- Sun Microsystems has built a reputation for innovative products and services, and the free and open Solaris Operating System (OS), the most battle-tested, scalable, and feature-rich operating system on the market, is a shining example. Now with the latest Solaris update (Solaris10 8/07), Sun is delivering new enhancements that help companies cut costs and get the maximum return from their IT investments.

The latest update of the Solaris OS helps customers alleviate common enterprise problems such as virtualization, resource management, and system performance. Solaris delivers built-in investment protection and new technologies that are even better suited to data intensive environments where price and performance are driving factors.

Best of all, it's free to download and use. The only thing customers pay for are the support and services, which range in scope and price to suit the needs of individual developers and companies of all sizes.

New in Solaris 10 8/07:

• Solaris Containers for Linux Applications, giving customers the ability to leverage Solaris applications and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 applications in a single system.
• Networking enhancements that enable customers to run multiple independent network stacks on a single system.
• High performance networking features to help customers leverage hardware acceleration for large packet network traffic.
• Enhancements in Multiple Page Size Support (MPSS) for greater scalability, especially for applications with large memory footprints.

One of the more notable new features for Solaris is enhancements to Solaris Containers, a virtualization technology which creates separate "zones" for each application on a single server. Containers have been built into Solaris 10 since the operating system's debut in 2005. Now Sun has added resource capping, which lets administrators define maximum usage levels for CPU and memory within each zone.

"This is especially important if you've got spikey loads, or when lower priority applications threaten to swamp higher priority applications," says Dan Roberts, marketing director for Solaris.

Virtualization changes the economics of running a data center, enabling companies to lower their footprint by consolidating servers and thereby spending much less on power, cooling and general administration. Sun is the only operating system provider to offer free virtualization—it's built into Solaris, saving enterprise customers the expense of licensing third-party virtualization software. "There is no added tax for every system to have virtualization," says Roberts.

Broad Support for Open Source

For the first time, Sun is providing the ability to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 applications within Solaris Containers. This gives customers the ability to leverage the extensive functionality of Solaris while continuing to use their legacy Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 applications with no modification necessary. This combination provides the most cost-effective and comprehensive platform for the entire enterprise.

"The other big area we're focused on is reducing total cost of ownership and generating significant price/performance," says Roberts. Sun has enhanced the capability of its built-in open source database, PostgreSQL, by including DTrace probes. DTrace helps administrators quickly diagnose problems and recover applications, and identify and fix bottlenecks. That helps minimize downtime. In fact, using DTrace to analyze applications has been shown to yield performance improvements from 30-300 percent. PostgreSQL has also been performance optimized for Solaris, and is integrated with the Solaris Predictrive Self Healing framework. Customers such as OmniTL have been able to use the open systems combination of Solaris and PostgreSQL to significantly reduce both costs and downtime.

PostgreSQL is just one of nearly 200 open source applications included in Solaris. Indeed, the OS has only gotten more feature-rich over time, and includes an application server, Java system directory server, development tools and the Java Desktop System productivity suite.

Innovation without Interruption

Enterprise customers are no doubt wary of spending precious IT resources retraining staff every time a new version of software is released. Training takes time and pulls IT staff away from more mission-critical projects.

For existing Solaris customers, there is no retraining required to move to this newest release. That's because Sun has maintained binary compatibility between Solaris releases for nearly a decade, enabling applications to run unmodified on Solaris 10. Additionally, Sun guarantees source code compatibility between SPARC and x86 processors, ensuring that applications can run across these platforms with a simple recompile.

That accounts for the rapid uptake of Solaris 10 which, in two and a half years, has topped 9.3 million licenses, runs on more than 900 supported x86 and SPARC systems and has a huge ISV ecosystem that has spawned thousands of certified Solaris applications.

With Solaris 10 8/07, customers immediately gain a competitive edge by using their existing IT assets more efficiently, with no additional risk or additional cost.

Download the latest version of Solaris today.