Solaris 10 Operating System One OS for SPARC and x86 based systemsEnterprises are under tremendous pressure to do more with less, roll out new business services faster, fit more servers into the same space, and comply with new regulations, all while their budgets are shrinking and headcount is frozen. Can an operating system really help you address these issues and turn IT into a business advantage? The answer is yes, with the Solaris Operating System. The Solaris OS is the strategic platform for today's demanding enterprise. It's the only open operating system that has delivered proven results, running everything from mission-critical enterprise databases to high performance Web farms, from large-scale SMP systems to industry-standard x86 systems from HP, IBM, Dell, and Sun. For customers facing challenging business and technical requirements—such as lowering costs, simplifying system administration, and maintaining high service levels—the Solaris 10 OS is the ideal cross-platform choice. Its innovative, built-in features deliver breakthrough virtualization and utilization, high availability, advanced security, and industry leading performance to meet these stringent requirements—all at a great price.
Key Highlights
Ten things to know about Solaris 10 OS
For business, industry, and developersThe Solaris 10 OS offers the technology, flexibility, and versatility you need to get down to business immediately, whether you're a small developer, a large enterprise, or anything in between. OpenSolaris participationMore than an open source project, OpenSolaris is also a community and a Web site for collaboration. Solaris source code, downloads, developer tools, mailing lists, user groups, and events—all available at opensolaris.org. OpenSolaris technology features a single source base for SPARC and x86 platforms. It includes key innovations delivered in the Solaris 10 OS, such as DTrace, Solaris Containers, Predictive Self Healing, ZFS, and Solaris Trusted Extensions—as well as providing access to new technologies as they're being developed. The OpenSolaris project provides developers and users with a low-risk option for evaluating Solaris source code, plus an excellent opportunity to participate in shaping the direction of the Solaris OS. Development toolsDevelopers need integrated, ready-to-use tools that are compatible with all the environments in which they must deploy applications. With that in mind, Sun includes popular software tools from the free and open source world and complements them with access to key Sun developer tools like Sun Studio and unique Solaris 10 utilities such as DTrace. Solaris 10 technologiesWith the Solaris OS, you get compelling new features that your applications can take advantage of immediately with few, if any, changes. Binary and source compatibility with previous releases also helps make it easier to move to Solaris 10 from earlier releases of Solaris. DTraceNow system administrators, integrators, and developers can use the dynamic instrumentation and tracing capabilities in the Solaris OS to see what's really going on in the system. DTrace can be used on production systems—without modifying applications. It is a powerful tool that gives a true system-level view of application and kernel activities, even those running in a Java Virtual Machine. This baseline data gathering reduces the time for diagnosing problems from days and weeks to minutes and hours and ultimately reduces the time to fix those problems.Solaris ContainersSolaris Containers is an OS-level virtualization technology built into the Solaris OS. Using flexible, software-defined boundaries to isolate software applications and services, this breakthrough approach allows multiple private execution environments to be created within a single instance of the Solaris 10 OS. Each environment has its own identity, including a discrete network stack, separate from the underlying hardware, so it behaves as if it's running on its own system—making consolidation simple, safe, and secure. In addition to Solaris Containers, Sun also offers Logical Domains (LDoms), a hardware partitioning technology that allows multiple versions of the Solaris OS to run on the same Sun CoolThreads server.By dynamically controlling application and resource priorities, businesses can define and achieve predictable service levels. System administrators can easily meet changing requirements by quickly provisioning new Solaris Containers or moving them from system to system or disk to disk within the same system as capacity or configuration needs change. With Solaris 10, customers can run unmodified Linux applications in a Solaris Container. Solaris ZFSThe Solaris ZFS file system is designed from the ground up to deliver a general-purpose file system that spans from the desktop to the datacenter. Anyone who has ever lost important files, run out of space on a partition, spent weekends adding new storage to servers, tried to grow or shrink a file system, or experienced data corruption knows the need for improvement in file systems and volume managers. Solaris ZFS addresses these shortcomings efficiently and with minimal manual intervention.Predictive Self HealingPredictive Self Healing is an innovative capability in the Solaris 10 OS that automatically diagnoses, isolates, and helps you recover from many hardware and application faults. As a result, business-critical applications and essential system services can continue uninterrupted in the event of software failures, major hardware component failures, and even software misconfiguration problems.
PerformanceOptimizing performance and efficiency in Solaris 10 is the result of many factors: underlying technologies, system configuration and utilization, tools, applications, and system tuning. An enhanced networking stack minimizes latency and offers improved network performance for most applications out of the box. With DTrace, you can delve deeply into today's complex systems when troubleshooting systemic problems or diagnosing performance bottlenecks—in real time and on the fly. And system performance optimization with the Solaris 10 OS running on x86-based systems enables head-to-head comparisons to other operating systems, such as Linux and BSD running on the same types of hardware. Additional built-in technologies that help deliver increased application performance include:
SecuritySecurity is more than a mix of technologies; it's an ongoing discipline. Sun understands this and continues its 20-year commitment to enhancing security in the Solaris OS. Solaris User and Process Rights Management work in conjunction with Solaris Containers to enable the secure hosting of thousands of applications and multiple customers on the same system. To implement a secure foundation for deploying services, administrators can minimize and harden the Solaris OS even more. Additionally, Solaris Trusted Extensions protects the most sensitive data in your organization using labels to implement Mandatory Access Control.
NetworkingExponential growth in Web connectivity, services, and applications is generating a critical need for increased network performance. With the Solaris 10 OS, Sun meets future networking challenges by radically improving network performance without requiring changes to existing applications. The Solaris 10 OS speeds application performance via the Network Layer 7 Cache and enhanced TCP/IP and UDP/IP performance. The latest networking technologies, such as 10-Gigabit Ethernet and hardware off-loading, are all supported out of the box. Additionally, the Solaris 10 OS supports current IPv6 specifications, high availability, streaming, and Voice over IP (VoIP) networking through extended routing and protocol support—meeting the carrier-grade needs of a growing customer base. Platform choiceThe Solaris 10 OS is optimized for both Sun and third-party systems running 64-bit SPARC, AMD, and IntelĀ® processors. This makes it possible to create horizontally and vertically scaled infrastructures and offers the flexibility to easily add compute resources. The OS runs on hardware ranging from laptops and single-board computers to datacenter and grid installations, while serving applications ranging from military command-and-control systems to telecommunications switch gear and stock trading. InteroperabilityThe Solaris 10 OS provides interoperability from the desktop to the datacenter across a range of hardware systems, operating platforms, and technologies, making it the ideal platform for today's heterogeneous compute environments. Not only does it interoperate with both Linux and Microsoft Windows, it also supports popular open source applications and open standards such as Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI); Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP); Web Services Description Language (WSDL); and eXtensible Markup Language (XML).
PostgreSQLPostgreSQL for Solaris is the popular and mature PostgreSQL open source database compiled and integrated into the Solaris 10 OS. It has been performance-optimized and enhanced to take advantage of advanced Solaris technologies—with support for native DTrace probes, Predictive Self Healing, and Solaris Containers—and is fully supported by Sun with enterprise-class 24x7 global offerings. Sun engineers collaborate with the PostgreSQL community and contribute their work back to the community. PostgreSQL for Solaris offers the assurance of reliability, scalability, and performance associated with advanced databases on the Solaris OS and all the cost benefits of open source. Learn MoreTo learn more about the Solaris 10 OS, visit sun.com/solaris. To give it a try, visit sun.com/solaris/get. A free, Web-based training course is available at sun.com/solaris/freetraining. To make the move to Solaris, see sun.com/solaris/move. |
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