Sun Microsystems' Solaris is an UNIX-based operating system certified against the Single UNIX Specification. Solaris is an extremely scalable and secure operating system and from decades it's powering up the network and it's at the heart of mission critical data centers. Solaris includes many bleeding edge technologies like the revolutionary ZFS file system, DTrace and Solaris Zones and Containers.
ZFS
The next generation Solaris Zettabyte File System(ZFS) features makes life much easier to the system administrator. ZFS let's you build pools of drives (or even partitions and files) connected via SATA, SCSI, iSCSI, USB, FireWire on different redundancy configurations:
- No redundancy.
- Mirror.
- RAID-Z (single, double, or triple parity)
On a given pool the administrator will be able to create file systems on the fly: no partition hell any more. ZFS uses a Copy-On-Write semantics and each file system can be individually snapshotted and backed up without unmounting, reducing downtimes to zero. Snapshot can be cloned and promoted to the file systemstatus themselves. With clones you'll be able to provide exact copies of the same snapshot without incurring into the overhead of a redundant space allocation which makes them ideal, together with Solaris Zones and Containers, to provide starting points for a virtualized solution, both desktop or enterprise.
DTrace
Solaris DTracetechnology and DTrace-enabled applications are giant leap forward in system monitoring and observability. Using the D language you'll be able to enable probes into your production system to collect data even for debugging purpose: DTrace probes won't affect the performance of your environment.
Virtualization
Solaris is a great platform to host virtualized environment. Solaris Zones and Containers, Solaris Logical Domains and Solaris xVMwill enable you to build both paravirtualized and virtualized environments on top of the Solaris operating system thus consolidating and fine-controlling your server resources, ultimately reducing their cost. Solaris network and storage virtualization capabilities, also, are the complement you need to build a flexible Solaris-hosted virtualized environment.
Java™
Solaris is the ideal platform to develop and run Java applications, which is the technology at the heart of many enterprise systems. Sun Java Enterprise System, Sun Microsystems' modular solution for the every need of the enterprise, integrate flawlessly into your Solaris environment and will provide you services such as a Java Enterprise Edition Application Server, Communication Services, Identity Management Services and Access Control Services.
Platforms
Sun Microsystems Solaris runs on the SPARC and on the x86-AMD64 platforms.