The main advance in the 4/03 release of Solaris 9 is support for much more capacious file systems. The Solaris Volume Manager, which does just exactly what its name suggests, can now create volumes with up to 2PB (that’s petabytes, or 1,000 terabytes) in size. This support is important for high performance computing, digital rendering, genomics, and other types of data-intensive processing. Sun says that the Unix file system can make file systems up to 1TB in size, and that in future releases, the Unix file system will be extended to 16TB. The maximum size for any individual file within a file system remains 1TB.
Sun is also adding in IPv6-to-IPv4 routing support into Solaris 9 release 4/03, which will allow companies to deploy IPv6 applications and services over existing IPv4 TCP/IP networks. The update to Solaris 9 also includes support for seven more Indic scripts to better support regional languages in India, which is important for customers who use Sun gear in India but also for Sun as it, like other IT vendors, moves more development and engineering into India. Solaris 9 also supports the Wubi input method for supporting various Chinese dialects. Chinese has over 40,000 characters, and creating a keyboard that can allow people to encode Chinese on computers is a real challenge. Wubi is a means of using four or fewer keystrokes on a special 30-key keyboard to build a Chinese character. Wubi support is obviously going to make it a lot easier to use Solaris in China, at least for those who have mastered Wubi. The new Solaris 9 also includes the Netscape 7.0 browser.
Solaris 9 release 4/03 is available now for download from Sun’s Web site. Customers on support contracts get the update for free.
Source: Computerwire
