Sun announces Solaris and ZFS updates

Sun Microsystems has introduced a new version of its Solaris operating system offering enhancements to virtualisation support and the company's ZFS file system.

The open source version of the platform has also been demonstrated on IBM mainframes for the first time.

Available now on Sun systems and as a download, Solaris 10 10/08 includes numerous enhancements over the core Solaris 10 code, according to Sun.

These include tighter integration of Sun's large-scale ZFS file system, enabling systems to boot from the software and operate it as the sole file system. ZFS also now offers increased data integrity and integrated disaster recovery capabilities.

Solaris Containers virtualisation technology support has now been enhanced to make it easier to migrate workloads among Solaris systems, even when containers are moved between systems with differing configurations.

Sun has also worked with Intel to ensure that the new Solaris release is optimised for the latest Xeon processor chips as well as Sun's own Sparc architecture.

"With the latest virtualisation enhancements, updates to ZFS file system and Intel system optimisation, Solaris 10 10/08 is an ideal platform to help customers with consolidation and datacentre simplification," said Sun vice president of datacentre marketing Jim McHugh.

Sun and IBM have also demonstrated OpenSolaris, the open source version of Solaris, running on an IBM System Z mainframe. The move follows a joint announcement in August that IBM was expanding support for Solaris.

An IBM spokesman suggested that it made sense to marry the two platforms, both of which are widely used in datacentres, in order to reduce running costs and complexity for large organisations.

In the demonstration, OpenSolaris was operating within the mainframe's z/VM virtualisation environment.

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