At its CommunityOne event, Sun Microsystems introduced a new version of its OpenSolaris operating system, the OpenSolaris 2009.06 operating system.
SAN FRANCISCO-At
its
CommunityOne
event here, Sun Microsystems introduced a new version of its OpenSolaris
operating system,
OpenSolaris 2009.06.
The new version delivers new features in networking, storage and
virtualization, along with significant performance enhancements and developer
productivity updates, said John Fowler, executive vice president for systems at
Sun, who spoke during the event's opening keynote session. Central to the new
release is the inclusion of Project Crossbow, a new networking technology,
according to Fowler. Developers can get OpenSolaris 2009.06 at
http://opensolaris.com/get.
"Building on a strong tradition of enterprise computing, OpenSolaris 2009.06
delivers advanced networking capabilities, world-record performance and
best-in-class virtualization features built directly into the operating
system," Fowler said. "This preview of the next generation of Solaris
demonstrates Sun has the leading platform designed for the latest hardware
technologies that power scalable and secure multithreaded applications in a
virtualized and networked world."
As a follow-on to Sun's ZFS technology, which reinvented the fundamental
concept of file systems, Project Crossbow's complete rearchitecture of the
network stack becomes the new standard for how networking at the operating
system level is done, Sun officials said. This project delivers the networking
capability designed for virtualization in combination with highly scaled,
multiple-core, multithreaded processors connected with extremely fast network
interfaces. More information on Project Crossbow is available at
http://opensolaris.com/learn.
Project Crossbow's virtual network interfaces provide full resource
management to simplify administration of complex deployments of multitiered
applications on a single machine or an entire data center, Sun said. Combined
with the ability to scale the workload of single or multiple network interfaces
across multiple core and processor systems, up to the largest systems available
in the world today, customers can increase network efficiency and performance.
In addition, OpenSolaris 2009.06 provides dozens of enhancements to ZFS and
encompasses it with a complete architecture of connectivity and protocol
support. New, fully integrated flash storage support in ZFS helps to optimize
large-scale pools of very high-performance storage by designating flash devices
as write accelerators and read accelerators, the company said. These pools are
automatically managed by ZFS to achieve extreme levels of performance across
many workloads, making the need for small caches on RAID controllers obsolete.
"We've taken ZFS, and we took away all the limits that have been around
for years," said Mike Hahn, a Sun distinguished engineer focusing on
storage. "With ZFS we skipped the 64-bit file system and went right
straight away to the 128-bit file system. And that takes away all the false
limits off the table."
Moreover, Shapiro said, "Flash is the most important thing to come out
in storage in 50 years, so we made OpenSolaris capable of managing a variety of
different flash devices."
Native support for Microsoft Common Internet File System (CIFS) has been
added as a full peer to NFS, as a high-performance
kernel with integrated features and support for Microsoft Windows semantics for
security, naming and access rights, allowing transparent use and sharing of
files across Windows, Linux and Solaris environments, Sun said. And to round
out the complete storage capability, Sun has designed new, very high-performance
support for iSCSI and Fibre Channel block protocols into the Solaris kernel,
allowing systems running OpenSolaris to participate as a client and a target
for virtually any storage topology, the company said.
All of these storage features are integrated into the Solaris platform and
take full advantage of its core functionality, including fault management,
networking, multithreaded scaling, performance, security and resource
management capabilities, Sun said.
Sun has expanded its SunSpectrum service portfolio to include yearly
OpenSolaris subscriptions, providing global enterprise-level assistance that
scales from the developer to the data center with Sun's comprehensive global
support-and proactive online and telephone services.
Meanwhile, the latest version of JavaFX, Sun's extension to the Java
platform that enables developers to create rich Internet applications (RIA), is
available on OpenSolaris with NetBeans and Eclipse support for developers,
Fowler said.
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