The SolarisTM 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) is not just a revision of Sun's UNIXR operating system, it is the result of four years of experimentation and half-a-billion dollars of R&D expertise. This product offers 600 new features, up to 80 percent system utilization and up to 30 times better application performance.

The Sun Inner Circle reports the reason this release is important to the industry lies in its ability to provide the highest level of availability to date and military grade security that prevents, rather than just fixes, security issues.

"Businesses, of course, are always in motion — the drive to do things better, faster, and smarter is ever-present. And the pressure is on developers to deliver applications that satisfy these demands," the article reports.

Maximizing applications to their fullest potential requires a thorough examination of the complex behavior between an application and the operating system. For developers to handle this complicated task, massive amounts of their time would be required.

To alleviate this pressure on developers, Sun researchers created a dynamic diagnostic tool called DTrace or SolarisTM Dynamic Tracing that is incorporated within the Solaris 10 OS. Instead of sifting through the /var/adm/messages file or pages of truss output, DTrace will capture information on only the events that developers selectively choose to view. DTrace will track down performance problems within the multi-layered software infrastructure and report on its findings in real-time.

"It works by using smart system probes that can access areas of ho-hum performance or bottlenecks. These probes are programmable sensors, scattered everywhere, illuminating every dark corner of your Solaris OS," the article explains. "System bottlenecks can be pinpointed and fixed as they happen, not days afterward. And with 25,000 probes in the kernel alone, DTrace can track, tune, and troubleshoot systems, all while boosting performance anywhere from 30 to 3000 percent."

Another area set for improvement is the business of managing file systems. Through multiple years of R&D, Sun researchers developed the zettabyte file system or SolarisTM ZFS that eliminates data corruption, eases file system management and incorporates data storage.

As the the only file system with built-in technology that provides provable data integrity, Solaris ZFS conducts end-to-end 64-bit checksums on all data to detect and correct silent data corruption. During this four-year period of research, "...Solaris engineers put ZFS through more than a million forced, violent crashes during the course of testing. Not once did ZFS lose data integrity or leak a single block. No other operating system comes close to this kind of data certainty," Sun reports.

In managing file systems, Solaris ZFS requires only five commands to create a volume, three file systems and then grow the volume. This five-step process was developed by Sun engineers, who essentially recreated an integrated file system from scratch.

Solaris ZFS also has been built upon virtual storage pools, which eliminates the need for a separate volume manager, eases the tasks of file management and, ultimately, reduces costs.

"As a 128-bit system, ZFS can store 16-billion times more data than conventional file systems. It's designed to support more storage, more file systems, more snapshots, more directory entries, and more files than can possibly be created in the foreseeable future," the article concludes. "And how's this for cool: ZFS is the only file system that is endian-neutral, so you can easily move disks from a SPARCR server to an x86 server."

Other major advancements with the Solaris 10 OS include:

• SolarisTM Containers: Allows for the creation of multiple private execution environments within a single instance of the Solaris OS; system administrators can create up to 8000 secure, fault-isolated software partitions, each with its own IP address, memory space, file area, host name, root password and more.

• Predictive Self-Healing: Provides fine-grained fault isolation and restart of hardware or software components that experience a problem; it automatically diagnoses, isolates and recovers from hardware and application faults.

• Security: Integrates a least-privilege security directly into the base operating system; the Solaris OS service has been converted to use only the minimum privileges necessary, protecting it against hackers. System administrators can assign groups of privileges to roles corresponding to their business processes for different kinds of administrators and developers. Security technologies incorporated into the Solaris 10 OS also include role-based access control (RBAC) for individual services; Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) secure networking; and a full range of cryptographic services that automatically adapt to and optimize to each hardware platform.

"...Sun looked at what customers needed to do - boost performance, simplify administration, eliminate waste, and maximize uptime - and the mission was clear: rebuild the operating system," explains Sun. "Sun engineers knew they could rebuild it. They had the technology. They had the capability to build the world's first 'bionic' OS. When designing the Solaris 10 OS, Sun infused innovation into every bit and byte of the OS — a strategy none of Sun's competitors can replicate. The result is a dramatically improved Solaris OS, one that puts innovation to work and, consequently, purges cost and complexity from the IT infrastructure."

For more information on the Solaris 10 OS, visit:

http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/10 [...read more...]

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