Sun releases update for solaris 10 OS

SANTA CLARA, Calif.: Sun Microsystems, Inc., on Thursday announced the availability of the Solaris 10 10/09 Operating System (OS).

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, said a press release.

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.

“Sun continues to add significant capabilities to the Solaris OS, delivering sophisticated power management and performance for the datacenter and helping our customers protect their business continuity,” said Jim McHugh, vice president, Datacenter Marketing, Sun Microsystems.

He further added that with Solaris 10 10/09, installation, update and patch features have been enhanced to simplify system administration and reduce cost. In addition, Solaris ZFS has been updated to integrate Flash technology, the next revolution in storage hardware, into the operating system. Solaris provides customers with a greater degree of flexibility, while its new features deliver the best performance and power efficiency on systems using the latest SPARC, Intel and AMD processors.

The new updates include simplified management of consolidated systems and provides several new features to help streamline the upgrade and patching process, especially on systems deploying large numbers of Solaris Containers, said the release.

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.

Solaris Containers gives customers built-in virtualization at no additional cost with low overhead.

Updates to Solaris ZFS, included with the Solaris OS, eliminates the need for customers to purchase and maintain a separate file system or volume manager to obtain enterprise-class data features. 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, delivering an optimized combination of performance and cost effectiveness. In addition, Solaris ZFS now allows administrators greater flexibility in setting usage limits in several ways, including by individual file system, user or group, added the release.