Definitions: Solaris

Definition

Solaris is an operating system developed by Sun Microsystems. It is often referred to as SunOS 5.x, and is  based on the AT&T UNIX System V R4. It is a UNIX operating system that encompasses both servers and desktop systems.

SunOS is based on  BSD initially written by Bill Joy, the founder of Sun Microsystems, who  released the first public version of SunOS in 1983. The last version of SunOS  was released in 1993. With Solaris, the kernel is based on AT&T UNIX V R4,  and not BSD.

Business Applications

Solaris is used for web, application, and database server applications. JAVA got its origin with  Solaris, and the modern day Solaris operating system offers many development and  debugging tools to the JAVA developer.

Companies such as Oracle choose  Solaris as their prime development platform for high-speed transactions and  reliability. Solaris is qualified for Oracle Application server, and Oracle transactional database, including the ability to form large clusters in a GRID environment for unlimited scaling.

With security being the forefront of all enterprises today, Solaris offers “grade A” security out of the box. Sun  has made the system secure from the installation--you must activate services  you need during configuration, which allows for finer control over the security  you need for your systems. This is why many enterprises choose Solaris as their application and web server OS.

Deployment Concerns

Since Solaris is a UNIX-based  system, it requires a highly skilled administrator to manage the system. Patching the operating system for issues and problems can become quite complex  depending on which applications are deployed on the system. Also, Sun Microsystems is a fast paced company.  Each Solaris version is supported for 10 years after its release, and it seems  that the number patches available from Sun are overwhelming in comparison to other UNIX-based systems.

Technical details

The current version, Solaris 10, operates on both the Sun SPARC and Intel or AMD x86 series processors. There are two types of Solaris,  Solaris and OpenSolaris. Solaris is a fully supported and purchased product  from Sun, while OpenSolaris is the bleeding edge open-source community version;  however, Sun does promote early fixes and technology to OpenSolaris before  those fixes are made available to Solaris.

Solaris is a 64-bit operating system that is very scalable in order to handle very large databases and  applications. The SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) chip that Solaris uses as its primary platform is designed to deliver the speed and reliability that enterprise environments require.

Solaris also offers the new ZFS  file system that is now regarded as one of the most innovative file systems in  an OS. With ZFS you get the capabilities of a SAN disk array-- such as snapshots, cloning and RAID striping—all within the operating system. The highlight is that with auto  corruption scanning, your data will never be corrupt.