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."
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