Highlights

Exponential growth in Web connectivity, services, and applications is generating a critical need for increased network performance. With the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun meets future networking challenges by radically improving your network performance without requiring changes to your existing applications.

• Supports current IPv6 specifications
• Speeds application performance by about 50 percent via an enhanced TCP/IP stack
• Supports the latest networking technologies, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, wireless networking, and hardware offloading
• Accommodates high-availability, streaming, and Voice over IP (VoIP) networking features through extended routing and protocol support

Turbocharged TCP/IP

The Solaris 10 Operating System introduces a new and highly scalable TCP/IP stack that significantly increases network throughput and capacity. This innovative stack speeds packet processing by reducing overhead when processing packets. The advanced design improves the performance of many networked applications by approximately 50 percent—without requiring you to modify a single line of application code. The resulting efficiency helps to drive down costs through increased scalability, allowing your systems to support more connections and enabling network throughput to grow linearly with the server’s number of CPUs and NICs. The Solaris 10 TCP/IP stack is tuned for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, wireless networking, and hardware offloading technologies.

• BigAdmin Page: Solaris OS Network Performance
• White Paper: TCP/IP Enhancements in Solaris 10

• Review: Network World
• More Details About Solaris 10 Performance Improvements

End-to-End Redundancy

The Solaris 10 OS allows you to design highly available networks for more resilient services by providing support for Layer 3 multipathing. This enables end-to-end redundancy from system to system and provides greater protection from network failures—even for Internet-based connections.

Solaris 10 implements the standards-based multipathing feature using a combination of Virtual IP address selection and Open Shortest Path First-Multipathing (OSPF-MP). Virtual IP address selection enables system administrators to specify IP source addresses for packets on a per-network basis; OSPF-MP uses the routing protocol to route traffic around failed network interfaces. In addition, the Solaris 10 OS includes the OSPFv2 and Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4) routing protocols, making it easier to administer complex routing policies.

Full IPv6 Deployment

IPv6 is the next-generation IP protocol, designed to meet the global demand for network connectivity. IPv6 offers a number of advantages over IPv4, including increased address space, end-to-end security, and autoconfiguration features. The Solaris 10 Operating System implements current IPv6 specifications and is an ideal platform for deploying IPv6-based network services. Customers will find migration easier with the IPv4 and IPv6 tunneling support included in the Solaris 10 software.

Telephony Application Development and Deployment

Solaris 10 allows you to develop, deploy, and implement telephony applications such as VoIP by providing support for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SCTP provides the high level of reliable network connections needed for telephony signaling and other applications, including SS7. Multimedia calls over IP networks can be established, modified, and terminated with SIP, enabling more features and functionality in devices such as IP phones. These protocols, combined with the other new networking features in the Solaris 10 OS, make Solaris the ideal platform for telephony applications.

• Solaris IP Filter Firewall