Sun To Launch Solaris 9 On May 22

Sun Microsystems

Solaris 9, billed as the foundation of the company's Sun One Web services platform, includes more than 300 features for improving manageability, security, performance and availability, Sun executives said in a statement Monday.

Expected to ship by June, Solaris 9 integrates Sun's recently renamed Sun One Directory Server (formerly iPlanet directory server), Linux APIs and code that optimizes performance on Sun's UltraSPARC III-based systems, including the Sun Fire 15K and 12K servers but not Intel platforms.

The Unix operating system upgrade also incorporates enhanced security and partitioning features.

With Solaris 9, some features of Trusted Solaris are being folded into the generic operating system. For users requesting still higher levels of security, Trusted Solaris can still be layered on top.

It also offers support for Sun's ONE Web services platform and the first building blocks for Sun's N1 project. N1 is the company's next-generation file system and operating system for the network--a layer of services that will run on top of Solaris and manage and assign resources for distributed XML Web services across a data center. N1 will be deployed in phases over the next decade.

For example, Solaris 9 will introduce a concept called containers that will enable "virtual" or software partitioning within system domains. The Solaris 9 resource, security and fault containers will enable virtual or software partitioning within domains, a first for Sun. This will provide a finer granularity of partitioning, so that users can partition a fraction of the CPU horsepower and a certain amount of memory for Web services and applications.

Solaris 9 incorporates advanced security features and new partitioning capabiliites through its new containers.