The company said yesterday a re-engineered, fast performing Solaris 10 TCP/IP stack would be previewed next month and virtualization technology that runs applications in so-called trusted containers would debut in the first quarter of 2004.
Sun claimed the Solaris 10 TCP/IP stack would be 10 times faster than today, while work is also underway to increase performance of its Java Virtual Machine (JVM) on the operating system. The announcements were made at the Sun Network Conference in San Francisco, California, although no date was given for launch of Solaris 10.
Trusted containers provides a simplified server virtualization, putting applications or servers inside an area of Solaris sand boxed for security and to prevent problems with other applications.
The changes are destined to boost Sun’s against IBM’s P690 and mainframes and also help improve performance of Solaris on smaller x86 boxes and reducing the need for customers to buy additional hardware.
Sun’s decision to further optimize Solaris for x86 comes after a dramatic conversion to Intel, following the company’s decision at one stage in recent years to kill Solaris on x86. That decision was reversed following an out-cry from users.
Despite taking on IBM, Sun’s Trusted containers will not mirror IBM’s approach of logical partitioning in its server operating systems. Solaris 10 will run using a single instance rather than multiple instances. This could leave Solaris open to a reliability problem, since if one container fails, all of the other containers might also crash.
Clark Masters, executive vice president and general manager of Sun’s enterprise systems products, said Sun would rely on hardware domains to dynamically re-allocate resources in the event of an error.
Masters added Sun believes single instance produces more efficient performance than logical partitioning because it doesn’t require multiple features like memory or boot-ups that are required when running multiple copies of an operating system.
Sun, meanwhile, used yesterday’s conference to update its hardware, which it claimed under-cuts Dell Corp, IBM and Hewlett Packard Co in specific markets. Sun launched a four-way Sun Fire V440 rack-mounted server, running UltraSPARC IIIi priced $9,995 and targeted at web and application server use. Also launched, was the Sun Fire V250 tower server, a two processor UltraSPARC IIIi unit priced $2,995, and the Sun Ray 1500 workstation starting at $2,995, updating two dated Ultra UltraSPARC II machines.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire
