FEATURES

1.SECURITY:

Solaris 10 provides advanced features that allow you to secure your systems and   Consolidate services with peace of mind.

The Solaris 10 Operating System, the most secure OS on the planet, provides security features previously only found in Sun's military-grade Trusted Solaris OS. User and Process Rights Management work in conjunction with Solaris Containers to let you securely host thousands of applications and multiple customers on the same system. Security administrators can minimize and harden Solaris even better than before to implement a secure foundation for deploying services. Solaris Trusted Extensions is a standard part of Solaris and allows customers who have specific regulatory or information protection requirements to take advantage of labeling features previously only available in highly specialized operating systems or appliances.

• Enable the strong mandatory access controls required by governments and financial institutions using Solaris Trusted Extensions
• Verify the integrity of your system using Solaris Secure Execution and file verification features
• Reduce risk by granting only the privileges needed with User and Process Rights Management
• Simplify administration by using the open standards-based Solaris
• Cryptographic and Key Management Frameworks for file and network encryption
• Protect your system against attack using the Secure By Default networking profile, IP Filter firewall, TCP Wrappers and IPsec/IKE encryption.

File Integrity and Secure Execution:

System administrators can detect possible attacks on their systems by monitoring for changes to file information. In the Solaris 10 OS, binaries are digitally signed, so administrators can track changes easily, and all patches or enhancements are embedded with digital signatures, eliminating the false positives associated with upgrading or patching file integrity-checking software.

The Solaris 10 OS also introduces the Basic Audit and Reporting Tool (BART), a file integrity-checking application for data files and customer applications. The BART utility allows a customer to create snapshots of their own data, applications and critical system files and periodically scan for changes to these files. Additionally, the Solaris Fingerprint Database project, hosted by Sun on the SunSolve Web site, provides digital fingerprints for all files shipped in the Solaris OS, spanning many previous generations of the operating system. The Solaris Fingerprint Database offers free online verification utilities that allow you to check the integrity of Solaris files on any existing system to ensure that no hacker has modified critical system files. Used individually or together, these file integrity tools provide powerful, flexible ways to monitor for changes to your operating system platform.

User and Process Rights Management:

In traditional UNIX platform-based operating systems, applications and users often need administrative access to perform their jobs. However, most implementations offer just one level of higher privilege: root or superuser. This means that any user or application given root access has the ability to make major changes to the operating system—and is typically the target of hacking attempts. The Solaris 10 OS offers unique User Rights Management (also known as role-based access control, or RBAC) and Process Rights Management (also known as privileges). Together, User and Process Rights Management technologies reduce risks by granting users and applications only the minimum capabilities needed to perform their duties. Unlike other solutions on the market, no application changes are required to take advantage of these security enhancements.

Solaris also offers protection against 'buffer overflow' attacks as well as an extensive audit trail that can be exported into common XML format for further analysis.

Network Service Protection:

The Solaris 10 OS ships with Solaris IP Filter firewall software preinstalled. This integrated firewall can reduce the number of network services that are exposed to attack and provides protection against maliciously crafted networking packets. Starting in Solaris 10 8/07, the IP Filter firewall can also filter traffic flowing between Solaris Containers when it is configured in the Global Zone. In addition, TCP Wrappers are integrated into the Solaris 10 OS, limiting access to service-based allowed domains.

Solaris also provides protection against attack through its Secure By Default networking configuration. When configured in this manner, a Solaris 10 system retains a usable GUI interface, can browse the Web, send Email and do other outbound communications. Only the Solaris Secure Shell encrypted remote access method is allowed for inbound communication.

Cryptographic Services and Encrypted Communication:

For high-performance, system-wide cryptographic routines, the Solaris Cryptographic Framework adds a standards-based, common API that provides a single point of administration and uniform access to both software and hardware-accelerated, cryptographic functions. The pluggable Solaris Cryptographic Framework can balance loads across accelerators, increasing encrypted network traffic throughput, and it is available to applications written to use Public Key Cryptography Standards (PKCS) #11, Sun Java Enterprise System, NSS, OpenSSL, and Java Cryptographic Extension software.

Starting with Solaris 10 8/07, the Solaris Key Management Framework is introduced to assist in managing digital certificates. The Key Management framework provides a single set of administrative commands for digital certificate creation requests, manipulation and loading across the most common formats.

Solaris also provides protection against theft of sensitive material by encrypting communications using the IPsec/IKE and Solaris Secure Shell protocols. Solaris IPsec/IKE complies with industry standards to provide encryption of data between two or more systems over the network without any application modification at all. The Solaris Secure Shell protocol is a specific set of utilities that have been modified to allow for encrypted remote access and file transfer between two systems.

Flexible Enterprise Authentication:

The Solaris 10 OS delivers a number of flexible authentication features. At the foundation of Solaris is support for Pluggable Authentication Mechanism (PAM), which make it possible to add authentication services to Solaris dynamically. Sun and third-party vendors provide many PAM modules and customers can create their own to meet specific security needs.

The Solaris Kerberos Service delivers Kerberos-enabled remote applications such as rsh, rcp, telnet, Solaris Secure Shell, and NFS file sharing. Kerberos-based protocols allow for enterprise single sign-on (SSO), authorization and encrypted communication.

Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) client-side authentication and interoperability enhancements enable enterprise-wide, secure, standards-based authentication to your servers and applications. All Solaris User and Process Rights management information can also be stored centrally in through the LDAP-based directory server, allowing for centralized management of users and security role definitions.

Local passwords have strong password encryption options, including MD5 and Blowfish, as well as account lockout, password history and complexity checking, and a banned passwords list. By providing strong password encryption, systems are less subject to successful password cracking should a password file ever be lost or stolen.

Repeatable Security Hardening and Monitoring:

New features in the Solaris 10 OS make it easier than ever to minimize and harden a system. The Reduced Networking Metacluster install option creates a minimized Solaris OS image, ready for administrators to add functionality and services in direct support of their system's purpose.

As mentioned previously, Solaris 10 now includes a Secure By Default networking configuration that disables many unused network services, while configuring all other services for local system-only communications.

The freely available Solaris Security Toolkit assists in the process of installing and maintaining a minimized and hardened operating system security configuration. The Toolkit also includes an audit mechanism to compare a running system configuration against a site-specified hardening profile. In this way, the Toolkit can be used to both verify and enforce compliance with an organization's OS security standards.

Mandatory Access Control and Labeling:

If your system requirements include privacy, increased accountability, and reduced risk of security violations, then Solaris Trusted Extensions is for you. A standard part of Solaris, true multi-level security is available for the first time in a commercial-grade operating system that runs all your existing applications and is supported on over 1,200 x64/x86 and SPARC platforms.

Mandatory Access Control is enforced in Trusted Extensions by the use of User and Process Rights Management as well as Solaris Containers, which have an information sensitive label applied to them. Customers can quickly configure new labels, which protect files, networks, applications and users against inappropriate access, without writing complex, error prone security policy files.

2.PERFORMANCE:

Solaris 10 delivers indisputable performance advantages for database, Web, and Java services.

Solaris 10 outperforms the competition on customer applications as well as industry-standard benchmarks. You can immediately benefit from a turbocharged TCP/IP stack, a radically improved kernel, advanced tracing technology, and special optimizations for memory allocation and chip multithreading (CMT)—getting faster performance without requiring changes to your existing applications.

• Achieves world-record benchmark results, setting performance and price/performance records.
• Delivers near-linear performance gains of 99 percent for database applications and 94 percent for Java applications.
• Increases IPSec performance on DES by 77 percent and on 3DES by 130 percent over the Solaris 9 Operating System.
• Speeds Web workload processing by 47 percent on SPARC platforms and by 43 percent on x86 platforms over Solaris 9 and by more than 80 percent over Solaris 8.
• High-Performance Networking Stack

The Solaris 10 Operating System's highly scalable, optimized TCP/IP stack is significantly more efficient, delivering powerful network performance gains. The enhanced stack lowers overhead by reducing the number of instructions required to process packets. This efficiency also increases scalability, supporting more connections and enabling server network throughput to grow linearly with the number of CPUs and network interface cards (NICs).

File System Performance:

File system technology advancements in the last several Solaris Operating System releases have resulted in significant performance gains. Enhancements include metadata logging to improve both reliability and performance. For example, under the metadata-intensive PostMark benchmark, logging provides a 300 percent improvement on nonlogging transaction rates. Significant improvements have also been made to enhance I/O performance for databases, provide fast access to directories with large numbers of files, and enable users to create multiterabyte file systems.

Application Performance and Tools:

The performance gains offered by the Solaris 10 software, as impressive as they are, are only part of the story. As significantly, Solaris 10 includes a highly integrated facility for troubleshooting and tuning your applications in real time. The Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology yields extreme application performance in remarkably short periods of time. Additionally, the Sun Studio 10 software the latest and best developer tool suite for C, C++ and Fortran application development gives you the advanced development and compiler technologies you need to further optimize your application performance.

Multiple Page Size Support (MPSS)

Solaris 10 includes Multiple Page Size Support (MPSS), which increases the efficiency for applications to access virtual memory, resulting in significant performance improvements for applications that use large memory intensively.

Memory Placement Optimization:

The Solaris 10 Operating System uses Memory Placement Optimization (MPO) to improve the placement of memory across the physical memory of a server, resulting in increased performance. Through MPO, Solaris 10 works to ensure that memory is as close as possible to the processors that access it while still maintaining enough balance within the system. As a result, TPC-H runtime is reduced considerably, TPC-C performance increases, and many high-performance computing (HPC) applications run in half the time.

Multithreading Advancements:

In the last few Solaris Operating System releases, the threading library has been enhanced for multithreaded applications. Starting with the Solaris 9 Operating System, Sun adopted a highly tuned and tested '1:1' thread model in preference to the historic 'MxN' implementation. By simplifying the underlying thread implementation, existing applications can see dramatic performance and stability improvements without requiring recompilation. In Solaris 10, Thread Local Storage (TLS) was added, simplifying and improving storage performance. The combination of the new threads model and the latest Java Virtual Machine (JVM) technology significantly improved SPECjbb2000 performance

3.NETWORKING:

  A turbocharged TCP/IP stack coupled with support for key protocols delivers the extreme performance required by today’s network-intensive applications.

Exponential growth in Web connectivity, services, and applications is generating a critical need for increased network performance. With the Solaris 10 Operating System, Sun meets future networking challenges by radically improving your network performance without requiring changes to your existing applications.

• Supports current IPv6 specifications.
• Speeds application performance by about 50 percent via an enhanced TCP/IP stack.
• Supports the latest networking technologies, such as 10 Gigabit Ethernet, wireless networking, and hardware offloading.
• Accommodates high-availability, streaming, and Voice over IP (VoIP) networking features through extended routing and protocol support

Turbocharged TCP/IP:

The Solaris 10 Operating System introduces a new and highly scalable TCP/IP stack that significantly increases network throughput and capacity. This innovative stack speeds packet processing by reducing overhead when processing packets. The advanced design improves the performance of many networked applications by approximately 50 percent—without requiring you to modify a single line of application code. The resulting efficiency helps to drive down costs through increased scalability, allowing your systems to support more connections and enabling network throughput to grow linearly with the server’s number of CPUs and NICs. The Solaris 10 TCP/IP stack is tuned for 10 Gigabit Ethernet, wireless networking, and hardware offloading technologies.

End-to-End Redundancy:

The Solaris 10 OS allows you to design highly available networks for more resilient services by providing support for Layer 3 multipathing. This enables end-to-end redundancy from system to system and provides greater protection from network failures—even for Internet-based connections.

Solaris 10 implements the standards-based multipathing feature using a combination of Virtual IP address selection and Open Shortest Path First-Multipathing (OSPF-MP). Virtual IP address selection enables system administrators to specify IP source addresses for packets on a per-network basis; OSPF-MP uses the routing protocol to route traffic around failed network interfaces. In addition, the Solaris 10 OS includes the OSPFv2 and Border Gateway Protocol 4 (BGP-4) routing protocols, making it easier to administer complex routing policies.

Full IPv6 Deployment:

IPv6 is the next-generation IP protocol, designed to meet the global demand for network connectivity. IPv6 offers a number of advantages over IPv4, including increased address space, end-to-end security, and autoconfiguration features. The Solaris 10 Operating System implements current IPv6 specifications and is an ideal platform for deploying IPv6-based network services. Customers will find migration easier with the IPv4 and IPv6 tunneling support included in the Solaris 10 software.

Telephony Application Development and Deployment:

Solaris 10 allows you to develop, deploy, and implement telephony applications such as VoIP by providing support for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). SCTP provides the high level of reliable network connections needed for telephony signaling and other applications, including SS7. Multimedia calls over IP networks can be established, modified, and terminated with SIP, enabling more features and functionality in devices such as IP phones. These protocols, combined with the other new networking features in the Solaris 10 OS, make Solaris the ideal platform for telephony applications.

4.PLATEFORM CHOICE:

 Solaris 10 offers the ultimate in platform flexibility, letting you run the same OS on your desktops and across your data center on SPARC and x64/x86 platforms.

The Solaris 10 Operating System excels in a variety of roles and application areas across your IT organization, due to its extensive platform support. In the datacenter, Solaris 10 delivers robust, around-the-clock support for leading enterprise infrastructure applications. It serves as a highly scalable platform for Web services, providing an ideal foundation for running the Sun GlassFish Portfolio, Apache, Tomcat, or many other Web software solutions. On the desktop, with the fully integrated GNOME-based Sun Java Desktop System, Solaris 10 allows power users and developers to take advantage of advanced features and value-added, cost-efficient office productivity and developer tools.

• Feature and API parity between the Solaris Operating System running on x64/x86-based systems and SPARC-based systems.
• Broad and growing support for Sun and third-party hardware and peripherals
• Optimized end-to-end for both the x64/x86 and SPARC platforms, from the kernel and libraries to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and Sun developer tools
• Platform Choice Data Sheet
• Platform Choice FAQs
• Third Party Applications Library
• Single Source Code Base

From the first day it was released, the Solaris 10 Operating System provided support for all of its key features, including Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris Containers, and the optimized TCP/IP stack, on a broad range of both x86/x64 and SPARC-based systems, a portfolio that has grown to include over 1,200 platforms from all major systems vendors.

Familiar Tools:

Integrated open source packages are fully supported as part of the Solaris 10 Operating System, including Samba, BIND, Apache, GCC, Webmin, IP Filter, and SSH. This means Linux system administrators have a familiar toolset available, pretested and integrated with their operating system.

Device Support Development:

To continue to grow the installed base of Solaris 10 on PCs, Sun is making significant investments in engineering and partnerships with key vendors to deliver robust leading-edge device support for a range of technologies. First and foremost, Sun is providing support for the latest x64/x86-based processors, which boast multiple cores, new interconnects, and new bus architectures such as PCI-Express. In addition, Sun is providing support for a range of device drivers, including drivers for Ultra320 SCSI, RAID, and SATA for storage; Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking interfaces; InfiniBand adapter; and even USB 2.0 and Firewire controllers.

Cost-Effective Licensing and Support:

With a free "Right to Use" license and a compelling set of service offerings on a per-socket basis, Sun support pricing is 30 percent to 40 percent less than Red Hat Enterprise Linux on equivalent systems. For example, on a typical two-processor server, the list price for standard Solaris support is $480 U.S. compared to Red Hat Enterprise Server at $799 U.S., reflecting a savings of 40 percent. You also pay the same support price whether you run Solaris 10 on 64-bit or 32-bit systems, and there’s no restriction on how much memory is supported.

Deployment Flexibility:

The modular architecture of the Solaris 10 OS allows drivers to be loaded dynamically with no need to rebuild the kernel. The kernel itself supports single and multiprocessor environments and is for the most part self-tuning. These features make it easy to define a single, optimized, security-hardened OS image for volume deployments. This efficiency works equally well whether you are manufacturing embedded systems or provisioning a compute farm. Solaris is therefore well-suited for use in appliances for appliance-centric industries such as the telecommunications, storage, network security, medical, and government markets, as well as being an ideal platform for deployment in larger configurations on all PC form factors (laptops, desktops, workstations, blades, rackmount systems, and multiprocessor servers, including eight-way x64/x86-based servers).

In addition the virtualization features built into Solaris makes deployment a simpler and more flexible process.

Investment Protection:

Choosing Solaris 10 allows customers to deploy and manage a single operating system across an enterprise—on the desktop leveraging the Sun Java Desktop System and SunRay clients, up through one-processor to eight-processor x86/x64-based systems, and on up to large SPARC systems with 100 processors or more. Solaris 10 scales application loads up and down as needed.

Compatibility at the source-code level also means that applications can easily be deployed across both architectures. Customers can reprovision existing Microsoft Windows or Linux servers with Solaris 10, protecting existing hardware investments and often gaining better throughput and performance. As Sun has already demonstrated with the SPARC platform, Solaris offers a risk-free growth path to 64-bit computing with guaranteed compatibility for existing 32-bit x86-based applications.

Sun’s Commitment to the x64/x86 Platform:

Sun has built a strong partnership with both Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel, and has now offers a broad range of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor-based systems. These systems ship preinstalled with the Solaris 10 OS, providing full support for not only the servers but a range of options, including host bus adapters and storage. While other vendors are "decommitting" from the eight-way x86 server space, Sun has a solid roadmap for delivering high-performance servers with up to eight dual-core CPUs.

5.INTEROPERATIBILITY:

Solaris 10 provides interoperability from the desktop to the datacenter across a range of hardware systems, operating platforms, and technologies.

The Solaris Operating System is an ideal platform for today's heterogeneous compute environments. Solaris 10 interoperates with many other operating environments, including Linux and Microsoft Windows systems. In addition, Solaris 10 supports popular open source applications and supports open standards such as UDDI, SOAP, WSDL, and XML.

• Provides source and binary compatibility for Linux applications
• Interoperability with Microsoft Windows services
• Includes Perl, PHP, Python and other widely used scripting languages
• Includes Apache, Samba, sendmail, IP Filter, BIND, and other popular open source software
• Supports Java application development and deployment with J2EE and J2SE

Interoperability through Open Industry standards:

Sun’s commitment to open systems stretches back over two decades and is evident in a number of ways. In the Solaris OS itself, TCP/IP and NFS allow communication and filesharing; the APIs and libraries are designed to be compatible with Open Source coding practices, and tools and utilities conform to a range of industry standards and protocols.

Familiarity for Linux users:

Since the Solaris and linux operating systems share much common heritage, it is not surprising that they can easily be deployed side by side. Libraries such as Glib, zlib, and TCL/Tk; scripting and shell utilities such as Perl, Python, zsh, tcsh, and bash, and common user and administrative interfaces such as GNOME, KDE, and Webmin are found on both Solaris and Linux. Further, through Sun's move to open source the OS, users can now participate in community activity through opensolaris.org.

Binary application compatibility is available through Solaris Containers for Linux Applications. This technology allows x86 Linux applications to run seamlessly and unmodified on Solaris. Now customers can consolidate multiple environments onto a unified platform and leverage the reliability, scale, observability and manageability of Solaris, while preserving application compatibility with internally developed or off-the-shelf Linux applications.

Interoperability with Microsoft Windows

Solaris offers a number of different features for interoperability with Microsoft Windows. Samba, which is integrated into Solaris, allows Sun clients and servers to interoperate with Active Directory and access file and print services in a Windows network.

Customers can now use Sun Ray virtual display clients and Sun Secure Global Desktop Software to remotely connect into virtualized and centralized instances of Windows XP Pro and Windows Vista. Both Sun Ray Server and Sun Global Desktop Software run on Solaris servers and use RDP to access Windows applications.

Java Interoperability:

The Java revolution has changed how people think of interoperability by no longer tying application design to a specific platform. The Solaris 10 Operating System provides a rich set of features for Java development and deployment, including not one but two Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE Platform)-compliant application servers: the Sun Java Application Server and the open source Tomcat Java servlet engine. For developers, the Netbeans platform provides all the tools needed to create cross-platform Java desktop, enterprise and web applications.

Infrastructure and Tools Software Environments:

In addition to interoperability around the Java platform, Sun provides development and deployment environments that run across multiple operating systems.

Components of the Sun Java Enterprise System are also included with Solaris 10, introducing an end-to-end software system that can support all of your infrastructure service needs on both Solaris and Linux platforms. In addition, the Sun Studio 12 tools provide a common development environment for C/C++ and Fortran applications for programmers running either Solaris or Linux.

6.VIRTUALIZATION:

With the escalating costs of managing your vast networks of servers and software components, you're looking for new ways to reduce IT infrastructure costs and better manage service levels. Consolidating multiple applications onto a single system means changing the way they're deployed, and this can be a very expensive solution. And that's where Virtualization and the Solaris Operating System come in. Solaris Containers, part of a comprehensive offering of Sun virtualization technologies including Logical Domains (LDoms), makes it possible to preserve the one-application-per-server deployment model, while efficiently sharing hardware resources.

• Dynamically move or replicate applications to accommodate business changes.
• Lowers administrative costs by safely combining multiple applications on a single system.
• Reduces conflicts among applications running on the same system by isolating them from one another.
• Supports Predictive Self Healing to minimize fault propagation and unplanned downtime.
• Enhances security by preventing unauthorized access and unintended intrusions.
• Integrated with other ground breaking Solaris 10 features at no additional cost

Sun XVM:

Sun's approach to simplify management of the next-generation datacenter is Sun xVM, a family of technologies that address both the virtualization of individual servers as well as the unified management of the physical and virtual aspects of the datacenter.

Logical Domains (LDoms):

Sun's server virtualization and partitioning technology for Sun Chip Multithreading (CMT) Servers, LDoms, lets you run multiple OSes simultaneously on a single server, thereby better utilizing server capacity as well as increasing efficiency and ROI. Enhanced Solaris Containers functionality allows you to improve system utilization by making it possible to securely run multiple, software-isolated applications on a single system or logical domain.

By leveraging the combined functionality of Solaris 10's Predictive Self Healing, Containers and LDoms, you are provided with an extra layer of security that allows you to automatically recover from potentially catastrophic system problems. This breakthrough innovation is what makes the Solaris 10 OS on Sun Fire / SPARC Enterprise CoolThreads servers the clear choice for achieving higher utilization rates without compromising service levels, privacy or security.

Solaris Containers:

OS virtualization with Solaris Containers allows you to maintain your existing "one-application-per-server" deployment model while consolidating those applications onto shared hardware resources. An integral part of the Solaris 10 Operating System, Solaris Containers isolate software applications and services using flexible, software-defined boundaries; it allows many private execution environments to be created within a single instance of the Solaris 10 OS. Each environment has its own identity, separate from the underlying hardware, so it behaves as if it's running on its own system, making consolidation simple, safe, and secure.

Leverage Solaris Features:

Solaris Containers integrate with the other technologies built into Solaris, to make your environment even more cost effective and observable.

With Solaris 8 Containers and Solaris 9 Containers you can run Solaris 8 and Solaris 9 applications on the latest SPARC systems and Solaris 10 today. The entire environment of the original source system, either Solaris 8 or Solaris 9, is automatically captured and transferred to a Container running on the target Solaris 10 system.

Customers with legacy Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 environments can now run these applications on newer, more cost effective and more powerful Sun SPARC systems such as the CoolThreads and MSeries servers. One or many existing applications can be consolidated onto a single system reducing power, space, cooling, and support costs. These environments can then be transitioned to Solaris 10 over time while removing the dependency on Solaris 8 or Solaris 9 support.

Efficient Filesystem:

The integration of Solaris Containers with ZFS allows multiple Solaris Containers to consume a minimal disk footprint by utilizing ZFS snapshots. The global administrator can also hand off ZFS disksets to the container administrator for example allowing them to create their own snapshots and clones.

Observability:

Utilize the observability provided by DTrace within a container, now application developers are able to probe their applications allowing them to debug systemic problems that are difficult to diagnose using traditional debugging tools.

Network control:

Utilizing IP Instances allows the option to dedicate a network port to a container. The container administrator now has control over the network port allowing in-container configuration of such things as IP address, routing table, and network device settings.

Secure the secure:

Take advantage of Trusted Extensions, an advanced security feature which implements labels to protect your data and applications based on their sensitivity level, not just on who owns or runs them. Credit card information, classified data, and personal records remain secure, and they can't be accessed by or written to unauthorized sources.

Extend to do more:

Solaris Containers for Linux Applications allow Linux applications to run unmodified on the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Enabling you to maximize consolidation of IT environments by allowing Linux and Solaris to coexist , increase flexibility by lowering the barrier to migrate, remove dependencies on unpredictable schedules and source code availability and also boost cross-platform development by extending the observability features of Solaris 10 to the Linux platform.

Sizing your Container:

Solaris Containers can facilitate customized security, performance or utilization requirements, through container sizing. IT managers and system administrators also have the ability to run a container bound to a specific set of CPUs. This ensures that applications assigned to these CPUs will have sole access to these resources.

Delegated authority model:

Solaris 10 gives the main system administrator sole control to assign portions of a system's resources to specific isolated containers. While local administrators do not have global control, they do have control over the applications and environments within their assigned container.

Fine Tune Performance:

By allowing systems administrators to assign a container to CPUs grouped on a single system board, Solaris 10 enables control over performance within the container due to the locality between CPUs and their memory resources.

Ease Usability:

Solaris Containers allows you to more accurately recreate your physical system in the virtualized world by allowing simple, easy to configure CPU and memory resource management together with a specific network configuration. This makes the definition of a container easy allowing rapid definition and deployment of new containers without the need to go through a time consuming hardware purchase cycle.

Server Consolidation:

A primary objective of the Solaris 10 Operating System design is to deliver tools that help you do more with less by consolidating your applications onto fewer systems. Solaris Containers allow administrators to create multiple virtual environments on a single system so applications can safely run without endangering each other. As a result, companies can better consolidate applications onto fewer servers without concern for resource constraints, fault propagation, or security, making consolidation simple, safe, and secure. Administrators also gain tight control over allocation of system and network resources, significantly improving resource utilization.

Application Isolation:

With Solaris Containers, each application runs in its own private, isolated environment—separate from the underlying hardware—virtually eliminating error propagation, unauthorized access, and unintentional intrusions among Solaris Containers. Providing a fine granularity of control, Solaris Containers enable administrators to ensure that all workloads have access to an appropriate amount of computing resources and that no workload is able to consume the entire system unless authorized to do so.

Because resources are isolated and dedicated to a Solaris Container and its applications rather than a complete system, highly efficient application consolidation is now possible. For example, Web servers typically listen to network port 80, and in order to do that they require root privileges, which entails a high security risk. To reduce these risks and run multiple Web servers per system, each Web server can run in a Solaris Container and listen to its own unique port 80, operating in an isolated and secure manner.

Rapid Application Deployment:

Developing new applications and services—and getting them operational as quickly as possible—can be a critical success factor for any business. Solaris Containers can speed application deployment by enabling applications to be developed, tested, and deployed on a single server without fear that they will impact one another. Private container identities also make it possible to have multiple development versions of the same application on the same system. As a result, Solaris Containers can help lower costs by eliminating the need to purchase a new system for new releases or revisions. Multiple deployment scenarios can be tested with ease, and administrators can roll back to previous settings and configurations if needed.

In addition using the migration features of Solaris Containers (attach, detach and clone) it is now possible to rapidly create, test and deploy applications into a production environment not only reducing required downtime but also have in place, by default, a roll back strategy. A developer can now create an application in a container, harden it and hand off to the test team. The test engineer can test and verify the migrated container before handing over to the production team. Finally, the production administrator can duplicate and introduce the verified, hardened container into production. All done more rapidly that in a traditional non-virtualized environment and also with the minimum of disruption.

Application Availability:

As an increasing number of applications are consolidated onto a single server, the potential exists for underlying hardware or complex software problems to negatively affect a much wider range of users and services than in the past. In the case of an underlying hardware problem, the Predictive Self Healing functionality in Solaris 10 has been specifically designed to work with Solaris Containers to automatically detect and mitigate hardware problems before they occur. In the event of a complex software issue causing system and application availability issues, DTrace technology has also been designed to be run either in a Solaris Container or across an entire system, giving system administrators the ability to determine the root cause of system issues as they happen in real time on production systems.

7.OBSERVABILITY:

Solaris 10 makes it easy to analyze, debug, and optimize your systems and applications, especially with breakthrough Dynamic Tracing technology.

The Solaris 10 Operating System dramatically improves the way system administrators and developers can identify the reasons for suboptimal system and application performance. Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology makes it possible to delve deeply into today’s complex systems to troubleshoot systemic problems in real time. Additional Solaris features provide you with enhanced system insight, enabling you to quickly identify and resolve hardware problems, and streamline and automate patch management.

• Real-time troubleshooting of systemic problems.
• New tools for low-level system debugging System hardware testing and analysis.
• Fine-grained project accounting.
• Enhanced patch analysis and delivery tools.
• Existing applications benefit from Solaris 10 enhancements without modification

DLight

DLight is a plug-in for the Sun Studio development environment that unites information you get from typical application profiling tools with system profiling tools such as DTrace.

• First tool to unify, and make accessible, sophisticated application and system profiling for developers.
• Now available as part of Sun Studio 12 Update 1.
• Utilize and visualize dynamic tracing (DTrace) technology.
• Simple, interactive, drag and drop interface

Dynamic Tracing (DTrace):

DTrace is a comprehensive, advanced tracing tool for troubleshooting systemic problems in real time. With DTrace, administrators, integrators, and developers can tune applications for performance and troubleshoot production systems—all with little or no performance impact.

Delivering accurate and precise analytical information quickly and safely on production, development, or test systems—with a single view from kernel to application—DTrace gives you operational insights and performance gains that you can’t achieve with any other operating system. DTrace will quickly become a strategic tool in your quest to develop better performing, higher quality applications, helping you save significant time and money when debugging complex problems.

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for the Solaris Operating Environment. DTrace provides a powerful infrastructure to permit administrators, developers, and service personnel to concisely answer arbitrary questions about the behavior of the operating system and user programs.

This new project proposes to add DTrace probes into the MPI library and will allow tracing of key communication events for parallel application software, thus making DTrace's award-winning observability characteristics available to high-performance compute environments.

System Analysis Tools:

Solaris 10 offers a number of other system analysis tools to give you better insight into your systems. These tools include:

Powerful thread analysis and monitoring tools, including lockstat, truss, and pstack

Memory management and debugging tools, including libumem, a high-performance multithreaded memory allocation library with built-in monitoring functions

Support for Intelligent Platform Monitoring Interface (IPMI), an industry standard for “lights out” management of x64/x86-based servers

Modular Debugger (mdb) and Kernel Modular Debugger (kmdb), powerful and extensible tools for monitoring and analyzing applications and kernel routines

System and application core administration and debugging tools

Sun Validation Test Suite for hardware testing and analysis

Process Accounting and Statistics:

The Solaris 10 project and task facilities allow you to label and separate workloads, as well as monitor resource consumption by each workload. The extended accounting subsystem captures a detailed set of resource consumption statistics on both processes and tasks. In conjunction with the Internet Protocol Quality of Service (IPQoS) flow accounting module, this subsystem can also capture network flow information on a system.

Enhanced Patch Management:

Proper system analysis can be critical to system availability and performance. To this end, the Solaris 10 Operating System includes tools to manually or automatically perform patch management, including analyzing the system to determine which patches are appropriate for your configuration.

8.DATA MANAGEMENT:

Solaris 10 has built-in file services to support your applications with faster performance, greater safety, and simplified data management.

The last few decades of file system research have resulted in a great deal of progress in Performance and recoverability. However, anyone who has ever lost important files, run out of space on a partition, or struggled with a volume manager understands the need for improvement in the areas of data integrity, manageability, and scalability. Solaris ZFS, available in Solaris 10, incorporates advanced data security and protection features, eliminating the need for fsck or other recovery mechanisms. By redefining file systems as virtualized storage, Solaris ZFS enables virtually unlimited scalability.

The Solaris ZFS technology delivers dramatic advancements by automating tasks, protecting data from corruption, and providing virtually unlimited scalability

UNIX File System (UFS), the traditional Solaris file system, continues to be available as a default option

Solaris Volume Manager software minimizes downtime by providing continuous data access, even in the event of a hardware failure

Network File System, Version 4 (NFS V4), adds enhanced security features, performance, and cross-platform interoperability

Solaris ZFS:

Solaris ZFS delivers ground-breaking file system capabilities by automating common administrative tasks, protecting data from corruption, and providing virtually unlimited scalability. With the release of Solaris 10 10/08, Solaris ZFS is bootable, with root file system support, so it can be used as the primary file system on any supported server, desktop or laptop.

Solaris ZFS uses virtual storage pools to make it easy to expand or contract file systems simply by adding more drives. Solaris ZFS makes it possible to significantly reduce costs by streamlining storage administration and allowing resources to be shared among file systems. The time required to perform some functions will be reduced by orders of magnitude—from hours to just seconds.

Near-Zero Administration:

With Solaris ZFS, complicated storage administration concepts are automated and consolidated into straightforward language, reducing administrative overhead by up to 80 percent. Administering storage with Solaris ZFS is extremely easy because the design eliminates many complicated administration concepts entirely. It allows administrators to state the intent of their storage policies rather than all of the details needed to implement them. For example, to add mirrored file systems for three users and then add more disks, Solaris ZFS reduces the number of tasks from 28 to five-—and the time required is cut from 40 minutes to 10 seconds.

In addition Solaris ZFS has been integrated with the Solaris Containers technology allowing container administrators to take full advantage of the features of ZFS.

End-to-End Data Integrity:

Under Solaris ZFS, all your data is protected by 256-bit checksums, resulting in 99.99999999999999999% error detection and correction. Solaris ZFS constantly reads and checks data to help ensure it is correct, and if it detects an error in a storage pool with redundancy (protected with mirroring, Solaris ZFS RAIDZ, or Solaris ZFS RAIDZ2), Solaris ZFS automatically repairs the corrupt data. This contributes to relentless availability by helping to protect against costly and time-consuming data loss due to hardware or software failure and by reducing the chance of administrator error when performing file system-related tasks.

Immense Capacity:

Solaris ZFS is a 128-bit file system, and it provides 16 billion, billion times the capacity of 32-bit or even 64-bit file systems. Hence, it supports more file systems, snapshots, and files in a file system than can possibly be created in the foreseeable future.

UNIX File System (UFS):

The UNIX File System (UFS) in the Solaris Operating System is extremely mature, very stable, and ideal for use with many traditional applications. The Solaris UFS has its roots in the Berkeley Fast File System (FFS) of the 1980s; today's implementation is the result of more than 20 years of development, improvement, and stabilization. Enhancements over the last several Solaris releases include metadata logging to improve both reliability and performance; under the metadata-intensive PostMark benchmark, this delivers a 300 percent improvement over nonlogging transaction rates. Significant innovation has also gone into improved I/O performance for databases, fast access to directories with large numbers of files, and the ability to create multiterabyte file systems.

Solaris Volume Manager:

Solaris Volume Manager is a robust disk and storage management solution suitable for enterprise-class deployment. It can be used to pool storage elements into volumes and allocate them to applications; redundancy and failover capabilities can help provide continuous data access even in the event of a device failure. With an easy-to-use interface, the software allows many operations—such as recovering volumes or expanding the size of a file system—to occur online, minimizing the need for costly downtime. Recent enhancements to Solaris Volume Manager include support for multiterabyte volumes, cluster volume manager, and thousands of partitions per physical disk.

Network File System, Version 4 (NFS V4):

The Network File System (NFS) was developed by Sun and introduced in the mid-80s as one of the first and most successful examples of open network file sharing. Version 4 is the latest NFS release and is designed to be both vendor neutral and operating system-type neutral. NFS V4 integrates file access, file locking, and mount protocols into a single, unified protocol to ease traversal through a firewall and to improve security. The Solaris implementation of NFS V4 is fully integrated with Kerberos V5, thus providing authentication, integrity, and privacy and enabling servers to offer different security flavors for different file systems. The Solaris implementation also includes delegation, enabling the server to delegate the management of a file to a client and reducing the number of round-trip operations required. In addition, the protocol includes operation compounding, which allows multiple operations to be combined into a single "over-the-wire" request.

SUPPORTED ARCHITECTURES

Solaris uses a common code base for the platforms it supports: SPARC and i86pc (which includes both x86 and x86-64).

Solaris has a reputation for being well-suited to symmetric multiprocessing, supporting a large number of CPUs. It has historically been tightly integrated with Sun's SPARC hardware (including support for 64-bit SPARC applications since Solaris 7), with which it is marketed as a combined package. This has often led to more reliable systems, but at a cost premium over commodity PC hardware. However, it has also supported x86 systems since Solaris 2.1 and the latest version, Solaris 10, includes support for 64-bit x86 applications, allowing Sun to capitalize on the availability of commodity 64-bit CPUs based on the x86-64 architecture. Sun has heavily marketed Solaris for use with both its own "x64" workstations and servers based on AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processors, as well as x86 systems manufactured by companies such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. As of 2009, the following vendors support Solaris for their x86 server systems:

Dell - will "test, certify, and optimize Solaris and OpenSolaris on its rack and blade servers and offer them as one of several choices in the overall Dell software menu".

IBM - also distributes Solaris and Solaris Subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x servers and BladeCenter servers

Hewlett-Packard - distributes and provides software technical support for Solaris on ProLiant server and blade systems

Solaris 2.5.1 included support for the PowerPC platform (PowerPC Reference Platform), but the port was canceled before the Solaris 2.6 release. In January 2006 a community of developers at Blastwave began work on a PowerPC port which they named Polaris.In October 2006, an OpenSolaris community project based on the Blastwave efforts and Sun Labs' Project Pulsar, which re-integrated the relevant parts from Solaris 2.5.1 into OpenSolaris, announced its first official source code release.

A port of Solaris to the Intel Itanium architecture was announced in 1997 but never brought to market.

On November 28, 2007, IBM, Sun, and Sine Nomine Associates demonstrated a preview of OpenSolaris for System z running on an IBM System z mainframe under z/VM, called Sirius (in analogy to the Polaris project, and also due to the primary developer's Australian nationality: HMS Sirius of 1786 was a ship of the First Fleet to Australia). On October 17, 2008 a prototype release of Sirius was made available and on November 19 the same year, IBM authorized the use of Sirius on System z IFL processors.

Solaris also supports the Linux platform ABI, allowing Solaris to run native Linux binaries on x86 systems. This feature is called "Solaris Containers for Linux Applications" or SCLA, based on the branded zones functionality introduced in Solaris 10 8/07.

INSTALLATION AND USAGE OPTIONS:

Solaris can be installed from various pre-packaged software groups, ranging from a minimalistic "Reduced Network Support" to a complete "Entire Plus OEM". Installation of Solaris is not necessary for an individual to use the system.

Usage with installation:

Solaris can be installed from physical media or a network for use on a desktop or server.

Solaris can be interactively installed from a text console on platforms without a video display and mouse. This may be selected for servers, in a rack, in a remote data center, from a terminal server or even dial up modem.

Solaris can be interactively installed from a graphical console. This may be selected for personal workstations or laptops, in a local area, where a console may normally be used.

Solaris can be automatically installed over a network. System administrators can customize installations with scripts and configuration files, including configuration and automatic installation of third-party software, without purchasing additional software management utilities.

When Solaris is installed, the operating system will reside on the same system where the installation occurred. Applications may be individually installed on the local system, or can be mounted via the network from a remote system.

Usage without installation

Solaris can be used without separately installing the operating system on a desktop or server.

Solaris can be booted from a remote server providing an OS image in a diskless environment, or in an environment where an internal disk is only used for swap space. In this configuration, the operating system still runs locally on the system. Applications may or may not reside locally when they are running. This may be selected for businesses or educational institutions where rapid setup is required (workstations can be "rolled off" of a loading dock, the MAC address registered into a central server, the workstation plugged in, and users can immediately leverage the desktop) or rapid replacement is required (if a desktop hardware failure occurs, a new workstation is pulled from a closet, plugged in, and a user can resume their work from their last saved point.)

Solaris can be used from an X terminal, which can boot from embedded or network accessible firmware and display a desktop immediately to the user. Applications and the operating system run remotely on one or more servers, but the graphical rendering (and occasionally the window manager) is offloaded to the X terminal. In the case of a desktop hardware failure, an X terminal can be easily replaced, and a user can resume their work from their last saved point.

Solaris can also be used from a thin client. Applications, operating system, window manager, and graphical rendering runs on one or more remote servers. Administrators can add a user account to a central Solaris system and a thin client can be rolled from a closet, placed on a desktop, and a user can start work immediately. If there is a hardware failure, the thin client can be swapped and the user can resume their work from the exact point of failure, whether or not the work was saved.

DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS:

Early releases of Solaris used OpenWindows as the standard desktop environment. In Solaris 2.0 to 2.2, OpenWindows supported both NeWS and X applications, and provided backward compatibility for SunView applications from Sun's older desktop environment. NeWS allowed applications to be built in an object oriented way using PostScript, a common printing language released in 1982. The X Window System originated from MIT's Project Athena in 1984 and allowed for the display of an application to be disconnected from the machine where the application was running, separated by a network connection. Sun’s original bundled SunView application suite was ported to X.

Sun later dropped support for legacy SunView applications and NeWS with OpenWindows 3.3, which shipped with Solaris 2.3, and switched to X11R5 with Display Postscript support. The graphical look and feel remained based upon OPEN LOOK. OpenWindows 3.6.2 was the last release under Solaris 8. The OPEN LOOK Window Manager (olwm) with other OPEN LOOK specific applications were dropped in Solaris 9, but support libraries were still bundled, providing long term binary backwards compatibility with existing applications. The OPEN LOOK Virtual Window Manager (olvwm) can still be downloaded for Solaris from sunfreeware and works on releases as recent as Solaris 10.

Sun and other Unix vendors created an industry alliance to standardize Unix desktops. As a member of COSE, the Common Open Software Environment initiative, Sun helped co-develop the Common Desktop Environment. CDE was an initiative to create a standard Unix desktop environment. Each vendor contributed different components: Hewlett-Packard contributed the window manager, IBM provided the file manager, and Sun provided the e-mail and calendar facilities as well as drag-and-drop support (ToolTalk). This new desktop environment was based upon the Motif look and feel and the old OPEN LOOK desktop environment was considered legacy. Solaris 2.5 onwards supported CDE. CDE unified Unix desktops across multiple open system vendors.

In 2001, Sun issued a preview release of the open-source desktop environment GNOME 1.4, based on the GTK+ toolkit, for Solaris 8.[22] Solaris 9 8/03 introduced GNOME 2.0 as an alternative to CDE. Solaris 10 includes Sun's Java Desktop System (JDS), which is based on GNOME and comes with a large set of applications, including StarOffice, Sun's office suite. Sun describes JDS as a "major component" of Solaris 10.[23]

The open source desktop environments KDE and Xfce, along with numerous other window managers, also compile and run on recent versions of Solaris.

Sun was investing in a new desktop environment called Project Looking Glass since 2003. The environment has been copied by other desktop vendors.

LICENSE:

Solaris' source code (with a few exceptions) has been released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) via the OpenSolaris project.The CDDL is an OSI-approved license. It is considered by the Free Software Foundation to be free but the GPL is incompatible with it.

OpenSolaris was seeded on June 14, 2005 from the then-current Solaris development code base; both binary and source versions are currently downloadable and licensed without cost. Source for upcoming features such as Xen support is now added to the OpenSolaris project as a matter of course, and Sun has said that future releases of Solaris proper will henceforth be derived from OpenSolaris.

DEVELOPMENT RELEASE:

The underlying Solaris codebase has been under continuous development since work began in the late 1980s on what was eventually released as Solaris 2.0. Each version such as Solaris 10 is based on a snapshot of this development codebase, taken near the time of its release, which is then maintained as a derived project. Updates to that project are built and delivered several times a year until the next official release comes out.

The Solaris version under development by Sun as of 2008 is codenamed Nevada, and is derived from what is now the OpenSolaris codebase.

In 2003, an addition to the Solaris development process was initiated. Under the program name Software Express for Solaris (or just Solaris Express), a binary release based on the current development basis was made available for download on a monthly basis, allowing anyone to try out new features and test the quality and stability of the OS as it progressed to the release of the next official Solaris version.A later change to this program introduced a quarterly release model with support available, renamed to Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE).

In 2007, Sun announced Project Indiana with several goals, including providing an open source binary distribution of the OpenSolaris project, replacing SXDE. The first release of this distribution was OpenSolaris 2008.05.

The Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) is intended specifically for OpenSolaris developers.[ It is updated every two weeks. Although the download license seen when downloading the image files indicates its use is limited to personal, educational and evaluation purposes, the license acceptance form displayed when the user actually installs from these images lists additional uses including commercial and production environments.

CURRENT RESEARCH

FUTURE WORK