Sun Microsystems Releases Solaris 10 10/08

Sun Microsystems has announced the release of Solaris 10 10/08, the latest version of Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), with several product updates and enhancements achieved through the OpenSolaris community.

 

Solaris 10 10/08 is built on the capabilities of Solaris 10 OS to help customers maximize asset usage and systems performance, manage datacenter complexity, preserve business continuity and reduce costs, Sun said.

 

Solaris 10 OS includes DTrace, Solaris Containers, ZFS file system and Solaris Predictive Self-Healing and advanced security features. It is supported on more than one thousand x86 and SPARC-based platforms and runs more than 7,000 applications, claims the company.

 

The new OS includes ZFS file system enhancements with recent contribution from OpenSolaris community. The new file system offers increased data integrity and fully integrated disaster recovery capabilities

 

Solaris Containers, the virtualization technology of Solaris 10 OS, has been enhanced with additional features to make it easier for customers to migrate workloads among Solaris systems. This is aimed at reducing administrative overhead required to move a container between unlike system configurations.

 

In the latest version, Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) continues its collaboration with Intel to offer the benefits of its latest Intel Xeon processor line to customers. Xeon processors offer improved functionality, power efficiency and reliability to the CPUs containing them. Solaris 10 on Sun Systems powered by Intel (News - Alert) Xeon processor 7400 series have achieved may world records, says Sun.

 

The new Solaris 10 10/08 continues to offer compatibility with more than 7,000 third-party products and internally developed applications. Through the Solaris OS update model, customers can easily upgrade to Solaris 10 10/08 without requiring additional hardware/software upgrades or re-certification of existing projects and applications.

 

According to Jim McHugh, vice president of datacenter marketing at Sun, with shrinking budgets and frozen headcount, companies are pressured to do more with less – from deploying new services faster to adding more servers within existing datacenter space.

 

"With the latest virtualization enhancements, updates to ZFS file system and Intel system optimization, Solaris 10 10/08 is an ideal platform to help customers with consolidation and datacenter simplification," McHugh added.

 

With built-in, open source, no-cost virtualization via Solaris Containers and Sun Logical Domains (Ldoms), Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server is an ideal platform to consolidate hundreds of enterprise class workloads onto a single system, the company said.

 

Additionally, the Solaris 8 and 9 Containers enable customers to run multiple Solaris 8 or 9 environments on a single SPARC-based system, allowing them to easily move existing physical environments to virtual containers on Solaris 10.