Solaris 10 OS – The most advanced operating system on the planet
Key Messaging
In a class by itself, the Solaris Operating System is a significant leap forward form the Solaris 9 OS,
establishing it in a class by itself when compared to competing operating systems. It offers many
innovative technologies that fundamentally change the equation for organizations needing to reduce
costs, reduce complexity, and minimize risk. The new features in the Solaris 10 OS bring mainframe-
quality software to even the smallest single-processor servers and provide a stepping stone into
tomorrow's data center.
For CIOs and Line of Business Managers who are dissatisfied with high infrastructure costs and security
vulnerabilities in their workgroup server environments, the Solaris 10 OS on x64 brings a proven,
enterprise-class OS at 1/11
th
the cost of Microsoft and 20-60% off the cost of Red Hat over three years.
The Solaris 10 OS is designed to help organizations optimize system utilization levels, deliver extreme
performance and provide virtually unparalleled security – all with relentless, around-the-clock
availability.
• Optimal Utilization of computing systems is a priority for IT managers where server consolidation is a
common approach and is improved in the Solaris environment by:
• Solaris Containers enable as much a 4x increase in system utilization by helping to efficiently and
securely support thousands of applications per system. Highly configurable, Solaris Containers can
dynamically adjust system resources to business goals within and across Containers with the added
benefit of isolating applications from each other and from system faults, so a problem in one
application cannot affect the system or other applications.
• Solaris ZFS File System (zetabyte file system) integrates devices, storage, and file systems
structures into a single structure, simplifying file system management and providing a reliable and
flexible solution that can help reduce cost, complexity, and risk.
• Extreme Performance is delivered with optimization for the latest UltraSPARC(R), AMD Opteron and
Intel Xeon processors as well as:
• Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), designed for use live use in production situations, is a powerful tool
for analyzing and diagnosing elusive problems and increasing system performance. It is non-
invasive and has no system overhead when not in use, but with its pervasive coverage, root cause
for intermittent system problems can be found quickly and performance gains in real-world
applications have been optimized to run as much as 30 times faster.
• A Unified TCP/IP Stack where the TCP and IP layers are partially merged, delivers a 30- to 50-
percent improvement in network throughput with a 10- to 15-percent lower CPU load than
previous Solaris OS versions.
• Unparalleled Security continues to be a focus as Solaris 10 OS adds significant features that can help
defend against attacks by preventing unauthorized access to data and applications with:
• Process Rights Management replaces the traditional UNIX(R) platform's “all or nothing” root
mechanism with a fine-grained set of privileges for control over the resources and objects that
processes can manipulate.
• Solaris Cryptographic Framework library secures data flows by providing a set of programming
interfaces for application-level and kernel-level cryptographic operations, allowing developers to
utilize highly optimized cryptographic algorithms and providing transparent access to the same
hardware encryption acceleration devices used by the operating system kernel.
• Relentless Availability – Expected in a Solaris OS environment, predictive self-healing
technologies provide new levels of application availability with:
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