Sun Looks To Prove Solaris 8 Strength

When Sun Microsystems talks about its platform for data center-strength e-commerce applications, its forthcoming Solaris 8 operating system is not far from the discussion.

The second beta version is set for release later this month. Sun plans in February to ship Solaris 8, with a focus on improved availability, Internet connectivity and manageability.

“Sun is making itself into being the be-all end-all of Web services,” said Sun customer Brock Freeman, information technology director at Mila Inc., a mortgage company. Mila uses Solaris 2.6 for its Web-based mortgage processing system and is considering upgrading to Solaris 8 in the first quarter of next year if the operating system proves robust, Freeman said.

Sun's release of Solaris 8 will coincide with the debut of another major operating system--Microsoft's Windows 2000, slated for a Feb. 17 launch.

“Overall, Solaris 8 may be the most important upgrade in the history of Solaris,” said Dataquest analyst Evan Quinn. Solaris and Windows 2000 are likely to be the main platforms for Web servers, e-commerce and messaging, and many users' decisions on platforms will be made in the year 2000 for years to come.

Solaris 8 will support clustered hardware redundancy for improved reliability and scalability for up to eight servers. It will include support for the Internet Protocol Version 6. IPv6 provides users with support for an unlimited number of Internet addresses, which will be important as the number of available IP addresses is now running out and new devices such as smart phones and cars come onto the Internet. Because transition to IPv6 will be a multiyear process, Solaris 8 will allow users to simultaneously support IPv6 and the current version of IP--IPv4--on the same network and systems, concurrently.

The operating system will also support improvements to dynamic system domains, technology that allows groups of processors in a multiprocessing system to be joined together into separate virtual machines, with separate memory and access to storage.

The system will let IT managers automate what happens when a domain goes online and offline. For instance, if a high-importance domain loses a processor, processors can automatically be configured from a less-important domain without bringing the system down. APIs will be improved to make support for dynamic system domains more transparent to applications.

The new version of the operating system will support 98 percent of the applications that now run on Solaris, according to Sun.

Administrators can install the new version on a separate partition and then reboot on that partition. The OS also includes real-time application support, new high-performance Java and a new Java Just-in-Time compiler.