Sun Microsystem's Solaris 10

Introduction

Sun Microsystem's Solaris 10 operating system is the next generation of the Solaris line. What is perhaps somewhat different about Solaris 10 is the number of features having direct business benefits for a wide range of users.

Solaris 10 provides a scalable, reliable, available platform for supporting applications on both Sun UltraSparc and AMD Opteron hardware, allowing the same operating system to be used to support both vertically and horizonatally scaled IT architectures.

Open Source

For the first time, Solaris has been made Open Source with the release of Solaris 10. There are no licensing charges to download and run Solaris 10 on AMD, Intel, or UltraSparc systems driving the acquisition part of total cost of ownership down . Additionally, through aggressive support pricing, Solaris 10's support cost for a 4-way or smaller system is less than the leading Linux for an equivalent system.

For RBS explicitly, the support agreement currently in place means that no additional support fees are payable for additional Solaris instances - driving the software maintenance cost down.

As the bank has a significant investment in Solaris systems administrators, this investment can by re-used to support Solaris 10. The transition from Solaris 8 or 9 to Solaris 10 is significantly less than re-training people in another operating system.

Combining the advantages of no software licensing and no incremental support costs with the lower training costs required to support Solaris 10 makes the cost of ownership of Solaris 10 significantly lower than other Open Source operating systems, and the ability of Solaris 10 to run on UtraSparc and Opteron systems enables the operating system choice to be simplified, removing costly complexity from the datacentre.

Containers

Solaris 10 has introduced a feature called containers. Containers in Solaris 10 are a controlled environment that applications and users can be contained within. For users and applications running in a container, the container looks like a complete instance of Solaris 10, but the access and resources used by a container are controlled by the over-all systems administrator. Even users given root access within a container are unable to perform any operations that would impact the entire machine.

Business Benefit

Solaris 10 containers allow a flexible way of provisioning processing power to applications - in fact with Solaris 10, a a SunFire E25K can be used to provide both vertical and horizontal scaling, all within the same system.

Containers provide an ideal way to quickly create test environments or to test software where the impact of unknown and/or untried software can be contained. Multi-tier application environments can be easily created on the same system.

Additionally, Solaris 10 containers allow for easy and deep consolidation of the server estate, allowing applications that have difficulty