Sun Makes Solaris 9 Software Available On Web Site

Sun Microsystems is making its Solaris 9 Operating Environment software available for download on its Web site. Customers can then test the software by running it with their current apps well before Solaris 9 becomes widely available next year.

Sun wants to make sure that customers using Solaris 2.6 can run their apps without recompiling them. "We let customers and independent software vendors link to the operating system at run time, so they never have to recompile their apps," says Bill Moffitt, product line manager for Solaris. Sun has created a board that can veto new software features that affect application program interfaces in the kernel of the operating system.

Moffitt says Solaris 9 will ultimately deliver many new features, but two are particularly important. First, users will gain access to a threading library for multi-threaded apps that are designed to run across multiple processors. The resulting system will be more scalable and will help customers conduct more transactions. Sun is also adding multiple-page support for apps that use huge chunks of memory. Because Sun's new 15K servers have up to 500 Gbytes of memory, users of those servers will get an even greater boost in the performance of apps that use a lot of memory.

Tony Iams, industry analyst at D. H. Brown Associates, says that for the first time, Solaris was the winner last winter when the firm ran its annual tests of all major versions of Unix, based on 130 criteria. He said Sun won primarily because of dynamic reconfiguring in Solaris 8, which lets customers change capacity levels for apps based on events that happen during the day. It's something Hewlett-Packard and IBM haven't figured out yet, says Iams. "So Sun raised the bar for Solaris 9, and they have to gain in areas like scalability," he says. "The other vendors aren't asleep at the wheel like they used to be."