OpenSolaris 2009.06 Released

June 1, 2009

Sun Microsystems has released OpenSolaris 2009.06 operating system. Central to the new release is the inclusion of Project Crossbow, the most significant networking technology development to Solaris in this decade.

"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," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems at Sun. "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 multi-threaded 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 re-architecture of the network stack becomes the new standard for how networking at the operating system level is done. This project delivers, for the first time, the networking capability designed for virtualization in combination with highly scaled, multiple-core, multi-threaded processors connected with extremely fast network interfaces.

Project Crossbow's virtual network interfaces provide full resource management to simplify administration of complex deployments of multi-tiered applications on a single machine or an entire datacenter. 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. Available today, both of these networking enhancements are major milestones for an enterprise operating system and are likely to set a new standard for next generation operating system platforms.

OpenSolaris 2009.06 provides dozens of enhancements to the breakthrough technology of 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. 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.

Native support for Microsoft 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. To round out the complete storage capability, Sun has designed new, very high performance support for iSCSI and Fiberchannel block protocols into the Solaris kernel, allowing systems running OpenSolaris to participate as a client and a target for virtually any storage topology.

With this announcement, Sun continues to deliver on a holistic, built-in virtualization design for networking, storage and application abstraction, raising performance and scale to new highs for the industry. Building on the advances in networking storage virtualization, the OpenSolaris platform delivers key server virtualization technologies in the form of Solaris Containers, Logical Domains (LDoms) for Sun CMT systems and the Xen-based hypervisor to give users a complete virtualization platform built directly into the OpenSolaris OS. One of the most widely deployed virtualization technologies in the world, Solaris Containers provide lightweight, agile, software-defined boundaries that can be used to create virtual servers for consolidating hundreds of existing enterprise-class workloads onto a single system.

OpenSolaris is fully supported on thousands of systems, including all shipping Sun x86 and SPARC(R) systems, delivering world-record performance and reliability, with the highest levels of service and support. Since it was first launched in May 2008, OpenSolaris has set 24 world records and industry benchmarks clearly demonstrating its versatility. The trend continues for OpenSolaris 2009.06. By leveraging the advantages of the built-in innovation and enhancements, OpenSolaris 2009.06 delivers 35 percent better memory management, 22 percent better integer arithmetics and 18 percent better multi-thread scheduler management when compared to the latest Linux releases.

Sun has expanded its SunSpectrum service portfolio to include yearly OpenSolaris subscriptions, providing global enterprise level assistance that scales from the developer to the datacenter with our comprehensive global support - and proactive online and telephone services. SunSpectrum support provides a differentiated approach via a proven combination of technology, knowledge base, process and partners to help customers quickly resolve problems and maximize their success across system products and operating system technologies.