SUNW: Sun's Solaris 10 Sets New Standards in Enterprise Security, Virtualization and Performance

Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: SUNW), the creator of Solaris, today announced a series of updates to the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) – Solaris 10 11/06 – that enhance efficiency, safety and reliability, providing unparalleled benefits for data management and business continuity.


"Solaris 10 is the only operating system proven to scale from widely available, industry-standard x86 servers to massively scalable, highly available servers based on Sun's latest UltraSPARC and CoolThreads processors," said Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris Marketing for Sun Microsystems. "Today is the latest in a series of blockbuster new feature announcements that have included virtualization, security, clustering, and performance enhancements—making Solaris 10 ideal for building secure, scalable and affordable Web-based applications and services."

New security features include Solaris Trusted Extensions which protects sensitive data and applications using labeled security technology, previously only available to highly specialized operating systems or appliances. This enables customers to quickly add new applications or users without performing extensive analysis or writing complex security policies—while maintaining iron-clad security. Also new is Secure By Default Networking, which automatically configures a customer's system to be impervious to network attacks by disabling many unused services, reducing the network exposure, while leaving the system fully functional for typical use.

Solaris 10 11/06 is currently in process for Common Criteria Certification at EAL4+ with Controlled Access, Role-Based Access Control, and Labeled Security Protection Profiles (CAPP, RBAC, LSPP) for SPARC and x64/x86 servers. Sun is also proud to announce that Solaris 10 3/05 was awarded Common Criteria Certification at the highest levels for an OS, helping to assure customers that their mission-critical systems are running on a well protected, trustworthy platform. More information is available on Solaris 10 security certifications at: http://www.sun.com/software/security/securitycert/#sol10

Virtualization improvements include Logical Domains and enhanced Solaris Containers. Using Logical Domains customers can now dynamically provision and run up to 32 OS instances on each UltraSPARC(R) T1-based system. Running inside the Logical Domain instances, Solaris Containers allow the isolation of software applications and services, enabling the creation of many private execution environments within a single instance of Solaris. Customers can detach, clone and move containers for greater utilization of system resources, simplified testing and deployment and improved application security.

To expand support for Solaris Containers, the company also announced last week improvements to Solaris Cluster, Sun's business continuity and disaster recovery platform for Solaris 10. Sun will continue to add breakthrough virtualization technology to Solaris 10 through 2007—most notably with the planned addition of the open source Xen hypervisor, a paravirtualization technology that presents a software interface to virtual machines. The Xen hypervisor is available today from the OpenSolaris Xen community project at: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen/

Solaris 10 holds 124 performance world records and Sun continues to introduce new features to enhance the high performance OS. The new network Layer 7 Cache—implements an HTTP cache in the Solaris kernel—to speed up the response time for Web servers, allowing them to handle more concurrent clients and serve them quicker.

For more information or to download Solaris visit http://www.sun.com/solaris
For more details about Solaris 10 features, see http://www.sun.com/solaris/features