Solaris 10 Operating System: Platform Choice - Run the Same OS Across SPARC, x64, and x86 Platforms

The Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) offers wide-ranging platform support, which means it runs in a variety of roles and application areas across your IT organization. In the data center, the Solaris 10 OS delivers robust, around-the-clock support for leading enterprise infrastructure applications. It serves as a highly scalable platform for Web services, providing an ideal foundation for the Sun Java Enterprise System, Apache, Tomcat, and JBoss Web software. On the desktop, along with the fully integrated Sun Java Desktop System, the Solaris 10 OS enables power users and developers to take advantage of advanced features and value-added, cost-efficient office productivity and developer tools.

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Highlights

Single source code base

When it comes to different platforms, Solaris is Solaris. Whether the Solaris 10 OS is run on SPARC processor- or x64/x86-based systems, it provides the same features and functionality. From Day 1 of its official release, the Solaris 10 OS has provided support for all of its key features on both platforms simultaneously, including Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris Containers, and the optimized TCP/IP stack.

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Familiar tools

Integrated open source packages — such as Samba, BIND, Apache, GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), Webmin, IP Filter, and Secure Shell (SSH) — are fully supported as part of the Solaris 10 OS. This means that Linux system administrators have a familiar tool set available, pretested and integrated with their operating system.

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Enterprise applications

Top-tier application providers have embraced the x64 platform, leveraging years of experience with the 64-bit SPARC platform to deliver a growing range of enterprise applications. In addition to key infrastructure applications from partners such as Oracle, Symantec, and BEA, thousands of developers are actively populating software ecosystems to address Suns vertical markets.

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Comprehensive device support

Significant engineering investment was made in device and peripheral support development for connecting to todays data center. These devices include high-speed networking (to 10- Gb per second), Fibre Channel and SCSI storage support, and InfiniBand connectivity. Solaris updates now provide new frameworks and drivers for Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express devices, plus continuous improvements in network driver performance. Support for enterprise storage also continues to grow with expanded RAID) and iSCSI — SCSI protocol over TCP/IP — capabilities. Where Solaris is used on laptop and desktop PCs, developers and system administrators can benefit from a stream of improvements which deliver 3D graphics, USB 2.0, Firewire, and wireless networking.

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Cost-effective licensing and support

The Solaris business model comprises a free right-to-use(RTU) license and a compelling set of service offerings priced on a per-socket basis. Sun support pricing is 30 to 40 percent less than Red Hat Enterprise Linux on equivalent systems. For example, on a typical two processor server, the list price for standard Solaris support is US $480, compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux server at $799. This reflects a savings of 40 percent.¹ You also pay the same support price whether you run the Solaris 10 OS on a 64-bit or 32-bit system, and there is no restriction on how much memory is supported.

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Deployment flexibility

The modular architecture of the Solaris 10 OS allows drivers to be loaded dynamically, with no need to rebuild the kernel. The kernel itself supports single-processor and multiprocessor environments and is, for the most part, self-tuning. These features make it easy to define a single, optimized, security-hardened OS image for volume deployments. This design efficiency works equally well, whether you are manufacturing embedded systems or provisioning a compute farm. This means the Solaris OS is well-suited for use in demanding environments such as telecommunication, network security, and health care, as well as offering an ideal platform for deployment in enterprise infrastructures.

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The SPARC advantage

Sun continues to innovate around the open SPARC architecture. The recent introduction on the Sun Fire T1000 Server delivers new levels of performance for throughput-oriented workloads that are typical of commercial applications, while fundamentally changing data center economics in terms of space, power, and heat production. The features of Solaris 10, coupled with Chip Multithreading (CMT) architecture, provide significant opportunities to consolidate Web-tier and ERP applications in the data center.

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The x64 advantage

Sun is shipping a growing family of AMD Opteron processor-based systems designed by Sun founder, Andy Bechtolsheim. Partnership with AMD ensures that Sun can leverage the latest developments in x64 architecture, such as multiple cores, virtualization, and power management. While other vendors are leaving the eight-way x86 server space, Sun has a solid road map for delivering high-performance servers with up to eight dual-core CPUs. Sun also offers support for hundreds of third-party systems, including laptops, blades, and servers from well-known PC vendors.

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Performance

The Solaris 10 OS outperforms the competition on customer applications, as well as industry standard benchmarks on both SPARC and x64 processor-based platforms. Without changing your existing Solaris applications, you can immediately benefit from a turbocharged TCP/IP stack, radically improved kernel, advanced tracing technology, and special optimizations for memory allocation and CMT. Additionally, the Solaris OS has benefited by almost 20 years of multiprocessor tuning and optimizations, and today offers near-linear scalability from single-CPU platforms to 128- way, 256-core systems. For more than a year, the Solaris OS has been the platform of choice for volume deployments of multicore CPUs in enterprise production environments.

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Investment protection

By choosing the Solaris 10 OS, customers can deploy and manage a single operating system across an enterprise — on the desktop by leveraging the Java Desktop System and Sun Ray ultra-thin clients, up through uniprocessor to eight-way x86/x64-based systems, and beyond to large SPARC systems with 100 processors or more.

Because Solaris 10 provides compatibility at the source-code level, applications can easily be deployed across both architectures. Customers can reprovision existing Microsoft Windows or Linux servers with the Solaris 10 OS, protecting existing hardware investments and often gaining better throughput and performance. Just as Sun has already demonstrated with the SPARC platform, the Solaris OS offers a risk-free growth path to 64-bit computing, with guaranteed compatibility for existing 32-bit, x86-based applications.

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Learn More

To find out if Solaris is supported on your x64/x86 system, visit the hardware compatibility list at sun.com/bigadmin/hcl.

For additional information, please see sun.com/solaris/features.

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(1) Based on Solaris 10 service plan pricing and support pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.