Sun Microsystems Upgrades Solaris

Sun Microsystems this week will take the wraps off a newrelease of its Unix operating system. Solaris 8 was developed to embody the high-end capabilities of mainframe systems and the latest Internet technologies, says Tom Goguen, Sun's group manager for Solaris. "With Solaris 8, we'll talk a lot about how to deliver a higher service level and drive down the costs and risk associated with implementing an operating system."

A new feature in the upgrade, fault detection and analysis, lets IS administrators establish policies for problematic conditions. For example, if a processor gets too hot, the capability may instruct a system to shut down the processor and reboot. Another feature, the reconfiguration coordination manager, lets administrators write policies that automatically redistribute system capacity. Processing capacity also has been increased from 30,000 to 1 million concurrent processes.

New Internet features in Solaris include support for an unlimited number of IP addresses and an Internet security standard specification called IPSec.

Tony Iams, an analyst with D.H. Brown Associates, says Sun could charge a premium for some of the new features. "Sun has made a lot of progress in mainframe serviceability," he says. "In the Unix domain, they've gone further than anyone else in dealing with online maintenance functions."