Sun Microsystems has announced a series of updates to the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) – Solaris 10 11/06 – that enhance efficiency, safety and reliability, providing unparalleled benefits for data management and business continuity.
“Solaris 10 is the only operating system proven to scale from widely available, industry-standard x86 servers to massively scalable, highly available servers based on Sun's latest UltraSPARC(TM) and CoolThreads(TM) processors,” said Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris Marketing for Sun Microsystems.
New security features include Solaris (TM) Trusted Extensions which protects sensitive data and applications using labeled security technology, previously only available to highly specialized operating systems or appliances. This enables customers to quickly add new applications or users without performing extensive analysis or writing complex security policies—while maintaining iron-clad security. Also new is Secure By Default Networking, which automatically configures a customer's system to be impervious to network attacks by disabling many unused services, reducing the network exposure, while leaving the system fully functional for typical use.
Solaris 10 11/06 is currently in process for Common Criteria Certification at EAL4+ with Controlled Access, Role-Based Access Control, and Labeled Security Protection Profiles (CAPP, RBAC, LSPP) for SPARC and x64/x86 servers.
Virtualization improvements include Logical Domains and enhanced Solaris (TM) Containers. Using Logical Domains customers can now dynamically provision and run up to 32 OS instances on each UltraSPARC(R) T1-based system. Running inside the Logical Domain instances, Solaris Containers allow the isolation of software applications and services, enabling the creation of many private execution environments within a single instance of Solaris. Customers can detach, clone and move containers for greater utilization of system resources, simplified testing and deployment and improved application security.
To expand support for Solaris Containers, the company also announced last week improvements to Solaris (TM) Cluster, Sun's business continuity and disaster recovery platform for Solaris 10. Sun will continue to add breakthrough virtualization technology to Solaris 10 through 2007—most notably with the planned addition of the open source Xen hypervisor, a paravirtualization technology that presents a software interface to virtual machines. The Xen hypervisor is available today from the OpenSolaris (TM) Xen community project at: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen/.
Solaris 10 holds 124 performance world records and Sun continues to introduce new features to enhance the high performance OS. The new network Layer 7 Cache—implements an HTTP cache in the Solaris kernel—to speed up the response time for Web servers, allowing them to handle more concurrent clients and serve them quicker.
|
