Sun Updates Solaris 10 with Focus on Virtualization, Security

Sun also integrated IP Security with Solaris Service Manager, which makes it easier for IT administrators to manage overall security functions, the company said, and Solaris also now supports UDP (User Datagram Protocol), which simplifies messaging across the Internet.

In addition, IPSec can be used as the interconnect for Solaris clusters, which enables more secure communication over the Internet within clusters.

There are also performance enhancements to Sun SSH (Solaris Secure Shell), which for executing commands on a remote machine let it work better with Sun's CMT (Chip Multithreading) systems powered by its UltraSPARC T2 processors. For example, SSH can now leverage hardware crypto-acceleration on UltraSPARC T2-based servers.

Sun officials in March highlighted new features in Solaris 10 that optimized the performance and power and cooling capabilities offered in Intel's Nehalem architecture, the result of a two-year partnership between Intel and Sun. Wake said Intel has become the second-largest contributor to the OpenSolaris community, after Sun.

Solaris is optimized to take advantage of new instruction sets in Nehalem, as well as the QuickPath chip-to-chip interconnect and Turbo Boost speed-ramping technologies. Solaris also was enhanced to work well with the upgraded multithreading capabilities in Nehalem. In addition, Solaris' Power Aware Dispatcher automatically monitors and optimizes the system to maximize performance while reducing power consumption, and can be used with Intel's new Deep C-States technology to reduce power consumed by idle processing cores.

Officials also said Solaris' DTrace troubleshooting tool and PowerTop feature, which keeps track of CPU utilization, also will optimize Nehalem's energy-efficiency capabilities, and the Fault Management Architecture in the operating system can help monitor the health of the cores in Nehalem.

The latest Solaris update comes as Sun is being acquired by Oracle, which announced a $7.4 billion bid for the company just weeks after a rumored takeover by IBM collapsed. Sun and Oracle officials have been mum on the future of the various Sun technologies, including its hardware business, Solaris and middleware offerings.