Sun Previews Solaris 10, Plans Late 2004 Release

At Sun's first quarterly product briefing, which featured the launch of UltraSPARC IV and Opteron servers, Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy and other company executives said new enterprise features--including N1 grid containers (previously referred to as Solaris Zones), a dynamic tracing tool, provisioning and self-healing capabilities--will propel Unix-based Solaris past other operating systems. Such utility-like features could help Sun ward off rising competition from a more enterprise-ready Linux 2.6 kernel.

Sun executives described N1 grid containers as the most significant aspect of the release. Also known as Zones, the grid containers are designed to provide a finer level of virtualization and dynamic provisioning of software blades, executives said. For example, with only one copy of Solaris, customers could run multiple workloads in hundreds of containers in a four-CPU, four-domain UltraSPARC IV system. Administrators also could assign and provision various resources to each workload within a container. Such dynamic provisioning is better than logical partitions used in mainframes, executives said, because customers need only one copy of Solaris, not an OS image for each container.

Solaris 10 will be delivered simultaneously for Sun UltraSPARC IV, Intel x86 and AMD Opteron, according to Sun executives. Solaris 10 will be the first version of Solaris optimized for the Opteron processor.

Executives also said that 600 new features planned for Solaris 10--including Trusted Solaris, role-based access and a rewritten TCP/IP stack code-named Fire Engine--will be available in an early-access version this summer.

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This month, Sun plans to begin trickling out some of the new features via its Solaris Express Live Update site. "In February, we're adding really significant enterprise [features] to that release," said Clark Masters, executive vice president and general manager of Sun's Enterprise Systems Products units. "It's no pain, big gain. This is huge."

Elements now available through Solaris Express include some Process Rights Management features, NFS v4, the Cryptographic framework, the new networking stack and the dynamic tracing tool. N1 grid containers--as well as key parts of the software's predictive self-healing capabilities--are coming soon, according to a Sun spokesman.

Sun is expected to mobilize iForce partners to push Solaris into the enterprise later this year. Software vendors announcing support for Solaris 10 include BEA Systems, BMC Software, Cadence Design Systems, NetIQ, Oracle, Sybase and Veritas Software.