Sun releases new update to Solaris 10 operating system
Sun Microsystems announced the Solaris 10 10/09 Operating System. The Solaris 10 OS has been extended with new performance and power efficiency enhancements, more streamlined management of system installations, updates and fixes, new updates for Solaris ZFS and advancements to further leverage the functionality of the latest SPARC and x86 based systems.
Solaris 10 10/09 provides new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install manner, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications, including Oracle database and application software.
This release also builds on Solaris’ proven track record as a highly secure deployment platform, including enterprise-grade security features such as Solaris Trusted Extensions, and support for the built-in cryptographic acceleration features of Sun’s UltraSPARC CMT processors.
Solaris 10 now provides a new automated framework for installing patches in single user mode, parallel patch installation of virtualized Solaris Containers, and significant speedups for SVR4 package installation, allowing system installations or upgrades to be up to four times faster than before.
New updates to Solaris ZFS
The latest release of Solaris ZFS in Solaris 10 10/09 integrates the ability to use solid-state Flash drive technology for data caching and high volume transactional applications. It also allows administrators greater flexibility in setting usage limits in several ways, including by individual file system, user or group.
Support for new processors
The combination of the Solaris OS and the latest SPARC, Intel, and AMD processor generations deliver the scalability, performance, power efficiency and reliability demanded in today’s enterprise datacenter Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multi-core/processor/thread systems and enables industry-leading performance and scalability on the latest CPUs.
Sun and Intel have also enhanced Solaris power management capabilities to leverage the power states of the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, boosting energy efficiency by adjusting processor power on-demand in response to system utilization. The Solaris Power Aware Dispatcher automatically monitors and optimizes a company’s system to maximize performance while minimizing power consumption and can utilize Intel’s Deep C-States technology to dramatically reduce power consumed by idle cores.