Sun Microsystems has made a series of updates to its
Solaris 10 11/06 operating system to enhance efficiency, safety and
reliability.
The new move is the latest in a series of new feature
announcements that have included virtualisation, security,
clustering and performance enhancements. The result, boasts Sun,
will be unparalleled benefits for data management and business
continuity.
"Solaris 10 runs on over 700 systems, including servers from
Dell's PowerEdge, IBM's BladeCenter, Hewlett-Packard's Proliant,
and Fujitsu Siemens' PRIMERGY product lines,” explained Tom Goguen,
vice-president of Solaris Marketing for Sun Microsystems.
New security features include Solaris Trusted Extensions,
protecting sensitive data and applications using labelled security
technology, which was previously only available to highly
specialised operating systems or appliances.
This enables customers to add new applications or users without
performing extensive analysis or writing complex security policies,
while says Sun, 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.
Virtualisation improvements include Logical Domains and enhanced
Solaris Containers. Using Logical Domains customers can now
dynamically provision and run up to 32 OS instances on each
UltraSPARC.
Sun will continue to add virtualisation technology to Solaris 10
throughout 2007, most notably with the planned addition of the open
source Xen hypervisor, a paravirtualisation technology that
presents a software interface to virtual machines.
To expand support for Solaris Containers, the company has also
announced improvements to Solaris Cluster, Sun's business
continuity and disaster recovery platform for the Solaris 10
OS.
Throughout 2007 HP and IBM will be slugging it out for dominance in
the business critical solutions arena and Sun is keen not to find
itself squeezed. The new moves are well thought out, addressing the
key concerns of greater utilisation of system resources, simplified
testing and deployment and improved application security.
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk