The Solaris 9 update offers improvements to the Solaris volume manager, performance enhancements and additional platform support for the Sun AMD Opteron processor and UltraSPARC IV processor-based systems.

Resource Library:

John Loiacono, Sun's executive vice president for software, characterized the forthcoming Solaris 10 as the "only enterprise-class UNIX available on the x86 platform."

The release of the update to Solaris 10 is available through Sun's Software Express program, which provides customers with access to the latest code base from the Sun development team through monthly updates.

New features in Solaris 10 include N1 grid containers, which can allow administrators to divide a given system into more than 8,000 software partitions per single instance of the OS; predictive self-healing technologies that enable isolation, diagnosis, and self-healing of both software and hardware faults; process rights management technology for new levels of security; and a new suite of dynamic tracing capabilities for analyzing and diagnosing elusive problems in real-time.