Sun Microsystems Inc. outlined planned improvements for Version 10 of its Solaris operating system on Tuesday, part of its quarterly update of new hardware and software products. Sun's hardware news -- including servers based on a new version of its UltraSparc processor -- will likely steal the headlines at a launch event in San Francisco Tuesday afternoon. But details of the next big Solaris upgrade, which is due for release in the third quarter, will be watched closely by many of its customers.
Among the new features is N1 Grid Containers, which allows users to partition a server into multiple, independent computing environments that share the same instance of Solaris, said Graham Lovell, head of Solaris marketing. Sun has discussed the technology before under other names; it will be branded under its N1 systems management banner from now on. Customers using Sun's high-end and midrange servers can already partition servers physically, allowing them to run several instances of Solaris on a single system. This lets them run applications in discrete areas of a server for better performance and security, but also requires them to maintain multiple versions of Solaris on each system.
News source: InfoWorld
