Sun Microsystems has introduced a new version of its Solaris operating system offering enhancements to virtualization 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. 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.
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.
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.