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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
NEW SOLARIS 10 FEATURES IMPROVE
ALL ASPECTS OF SUN OS
Sun Microsystems is releasing Solaris 10, a new version of its popular
operating system. Solaris 10 will offer customers a superior value, as well as
improved security, performance and stability.
New features include N1 Grid containers, a "predictive" self-healing
framework, process rights management derived from Trusted Solaris and a
bottleneck-hunting techonolgy called "dynamic trace."
In order for both developers and Sun to reap the most benefits from Solaris
10, developers must buy into the company's agenda. As a mean to this end, Sun
has been pre-releasing pieces of the new OS to developers through its Software
Express program.
Among the goals of Solaris 10 is the reduction of licensing costs. Thus,
Sun
is utilizing N1 Grid containers, which allow a single system to be divided
int0 4,000 partitions per copy. Solaris 10 also allows customers to partition
processing power on a per machine basis.
While Grid containers consolidate resources into a single copy of Solaris,
this technology makes fault management more of a focal point.
Web services, utility computing, .NET, CPU harvesting and distributed
computing are just a few of the technologies that fall under the Grid
computing umbrella. Gt04 -- a premiere enterprise Grid computing conference
targeting industrial and commercial users -- will gather experts, and outline
strategies and road maps for Grid deployment. For more information, visit
www.gt04.com.
Grid computing is here!
Therefore, Solaris 10 features its "predictive" self-healing framework,
which
is designed to nip system failures in the bud, so to speak. Functions include
copying data from failing memory to another area, and determining the order in
which to restart services and report problems to administrators.
Set up into three layers -- kernel telemetry at the OS level, a
hardware-monitoring engine and a fault manager -- Solaris 10 creates a
registry that keeps track of all open services and their dependencies.
Sun is touting Solaris 10's predictive element as a key difference between
its
product and that of rival IBM.
In order to protect Solaris-powered hardware from being compromised by
hackers, Sun is using process rights management from Trusted Solaris -- a
military-grade version of the OS. Process rights management allows
administrators the to give individual processes the minimal rights needed for
a task.
Even with the attention paid to security in Solaris 10, better performance
is
a key aspect of the OS. According to Sun, users can expect a boost -- anywhere
from 3 to 30 percent -- in speed.
Hardware-wise, has made numerous changes. They inlcude dishing out
UltraSPARC
IV processors, issuing a new lineup of servers, and supporting multiple-thread
CPUs.
However, the real performance enhancer is the feature called "Dynamic
Tracing."
This feature analyzes and diagnoses bottlenecks. Dynamic Tracing works in
production environments under normal conditions.
Solaris 10 is expected to ship, although a price has not been set, by the
end
of the year.
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