Solaris 10 will be a free download

07 Dec 2004 00:00 IST

New Update

At its Network Computing '04 Q4 launch recently, Sun Microsystems unveiled
the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). Representing 3,000 engineering years and a
$500 USD million-plus R&D investment, Solaris 10 contains more than 600
innovative new features and is the most advanced Unix OS ever.

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Sun plans to make Solaris 10 available for SPARC, x86, AMD64 and EM64T
systems as a free download by January 31, 2005. Unlike other free distributions,
which provide only early access or evaluation free, Sun will provide its
commercial grade Solaris 10 product free for deployment. A range of services are
available for a fee. Solaris 10 is a vendor-neutral OS that is supported on more
than 270 different hardware platforms from vendors as diverse as Dell, Fujitsu,
Fujitsu Siemens Computers, IBM and HP. Sun also unveiled a new advertising
campaign and game-changing business model in support of the Solaris 10 launch.

JONATHAN SCHWARTZ

Solaris 10 is fastest Sun OS, more than 40% faster than Solaris 9 in web server performance on both SPARC and x86

"Operating systems matter now more than ever," said Jonathan
Schwartz, President and COO, Sun Microsystems. "Solaris 10 is an industry
milestone. This is the result of Sun's huge investment in R&D and
demonstrates how superior engineering can deliver real customer advantage. With
thousands of customers previewing Solaris 10 as part of the Sun Software Express
for Solaris program and more than half million installations of the product so
far, Solaris 10 is the most anticipated product release."

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Designed for modern datacenter workloads, Solaris 10 is the fastest OS ever
released by Sun - more than 40% faster than Solaris 9 in web server performance
on both SPARC and x86.

Originally launched in 1991, Solaris has become the #1 Unix OS. Nearly all
global Fortune 1000 companies run Solaris. A growing base of more than 1000 ISVs
with more than 12,000 applications enable it to be deployed from the datacenter
to the desktop. Solaris 10 will become Sun's flagship distribution for current
and future system platforms.

CI NEWS BUREAU

KEY FEATURES

DTrace - With new diagnostic tools in Solaris 10, developers can quickly
zero in on performance issues and hard-to-find bugs.

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Solaris Containers - Solaris 10 is the only OS to provide multiple
software partitions with more than 8000 containers - on one instance of the
OS.

Predictive Self Healing - Solaris 10 can automatically diagnose, isolate
and recover from many hardware and application faults to vastly reduce
system downtime.

AMD64 - Solaris 10 is optimized for AMD Opteron 64-bit processors,
providing far greater performance than previously available on low-cost
architectures, while continuing to provide binary compatibility between
32-bit and 64-bit environments.

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Multiplicity - Solaris 10 will be the only OS to run Solaris and native
Linux binaries side-by-side with no modifications.

ZFS - With 16 billion billion times more capacity than current
64-bit file systems, ZFS will be the industry's only file system with
virtually unlimited storage capacity.

Sun Update Connection - An update service that allows users to analyze the
system and stay up-to-date from almost anywhere.

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Guaranteed Compatibility - Sun offers the Solaris Application Guarantee to
ensure that applications written for previous versions of Solaris will run
on Solaris 10.