Sun launches its long-awaited update to the Solaris Unix
operating system this week, promising it will lower users' IT costs
and ease systems management.
The operating systems offers server virtualisation, real-time
troubleshooting and ZFS, a new file system that can simplify
storage management. Sun has included a predictive self-healing
feature for recovering from application and hardware failures.
Sun has also reworked its implementation of networking in Solaris
10 to improve the performance of the networking protocol
TCP/IP.
It has tackled server consolidation through a Solaris 10 feature
dubbed Solaris Containers, which the company said isolated
applications running on the OS. Each application could be given a
private environment, virtually eliminating error propagation,
unauthorised access and unintentional intrusion, Sun said.
Optimisation is achieved through DTrace, a tool for fine-tuning
applications for performance and troubleshooting production
systems. The DTrace tool gives IT admin staff visibility into the
Solaris kernel and application activity, Sun said.
Analyst group Forrester Research said the combination of Solaris 10
and new low-cost hardware would make it more attractive for Sun
customers to remain with the supplier.
"The benefits to Sun customers are significant. Sun users have more
flexible options for consolidation with containers, the opportunity
to easily optimise their applications and to jump to a commodity
hardware price-performance curve with AMD-based systems," Forrester
said.
Forrester recommended that users considering migrating from Sun,
either to reduce cost or to gain greater performance improvement,
should evaluate what Sun can offer thanks to the tie-up with
Fujitsu-Siemens and AMD earlier in the year.
Sun has been facing stiff competition, both at the high end from
rivals Hewlett-Packard and IBM, and at the low end from Microsoft,
according to Dan Kusnetzky, a vice-president at analyst group
IDC.
Microsoft is targeting Unix users with Windows as a low-cost
alterative to expensive Unix hardware and, at the high end,
Kusnetzky said Linux was gaining acceptance in high-performance
computing applications and as a server environment for network and
distributed systems.