Highlights

The Solaris 10 Operating System excels in a variety of roles and application areas across your IT organization, due to its extensive platform support. In the datacenter, Solaris 10 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 running the Sun GlassFish Portfolio, Apache, Tomcat, or many other Web software solutions. On the desktop, with the fully integrated GNOME-based Sun Java Desktop System, Solaris 10 allows power users and developers to take advantage of advanced features and value-added, cost-efficient office productivity and developer tools.

• Feature and API parity between the Solaris Operating System running on x64/x86-based systems and SPARC-based systems
• Broad and growing support for Sun and third-party hardware and peripherals
• Optimized end-to-end for both the x64/x86 and SPARC platforms, from the kernel and libraries to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Sun developer tools

Single Source Code Base

From the first day it was released, the Solaris 10 Operating System provided support for all of its key features, including Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris Containers, and the optimized TCP/IP stack, on a broad range of both x86/x64 and SPARC-based systems, a portfolio that has grown to include over 1,200 platforms from all major systems vendors.

Familiar Tools

Integrated open source packages are fully supported as part of the Solaris 10 Operating System, including Samba, BIND, Apache, GCC, Webmin, IP Filter, and SSH. This means Linux system administrators have a familiar toolset available, pretested and integrated with their operating system.

• What You Get With Solaris 10

Device Support Development

To continue to grow the installed base of Solaris 10 on PCs, Sun is making significant investments in engineering and partnerships with key vendors to deliver robust leading-edge device support for a range of technologies. First and foremost, Sun is providing support for the latest x64/x86-based processors, which boast multiple cores, new interconnects, and new bus architectures such as PCI-Express. In addition, Sun is providing support for a range of device drivers, including drivers for Ultra320 SCSI, RAID, and SATA for storage; Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking interfaces; InfiniBand adapter; and even USB 2.0 and Firewire controllers.

• Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)

Cost-Effective Licensing and Support

With a free "Right to Use" license and a compelling set of service offerings on a per-socket basis, Sun support pricing is 30 percent 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 $480 U.S. compared to Red Hat Enterprise Server at $799 U.S., reflecting a savings of 40 percent. You also pay the same support price whether you run Solaris 10 on 64-bit or 32-bit systems, and there’s no restriction on how much memory is supported.

• Solaris Subscriptions

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 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 efficiency works equally well whether you are manufacturing embedded systems or provisioning a compute farm. Solaris is therefore well-suited for use in appliances for appliance-centric industries such as the telecommunications, storage, network security, medical, and government markets, as well as being an ideal platform for deployment in larger configurations on all PC form factors (laptops, desktops, workstations, blades, rackmount systems, and multiprocessor servers, including eight-way x64/x86-based servers).

In addition the virtualization features built into Solaris makes deployment a simpler and more flexible process.

Investment Protection

Choosing Solaris 10 allows customers to deploy and manage a single operating system across an enterprise—on the desktop leveraging the Sun Java Desktop System and SunRay clients, up through one-processor to eight-processor x86/x64-based systems, and on up to large SPARC systems with 100 processors or more. Solaris 10 scales application loads up and down as needed.

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

• Performance Details

Sun’s Commitment to the x64/x86 Platform

Sun has built a strong partnership with both Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel, and has now offers a broad range of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor-based systems. These systems ship preinstalled with the Solaris 10 OS, providing full support for not only the servers but a range of options, including host bus adapters and storage. While other vendors are "decommitting" from the eight-way x86 server space, Sun has a solid roadmap for delivering high-performance servers with up to eight dual-core CPUs.

• More Details About the Sun and AMD Partnership
• More Details About the Sun and Intel Partnership