Solaris 10 (10/09) – Get It While You Can

Since no one really knows what will happen to Sun after it is swallowed up by Oracle (or, in the case of regulatory problems, if it will be) now might be a really good time to download the very latest version of the Solaris operating system, while it is available, and free.

Tech Connect expounds upon the milestone release -

While still waiting to join Oracle’s empire, Sun Microsystems has introduced an updated version of its Solaris operating system. Dubbed Solaris 10 10/09, the new release comes with support for the latest SPARC, Intel, and AMD processors, and includes performance and power efficiency enhancements, a more streamlined management of system installations, lots of fixes and Solaris ZFS updates, including the ability to use solid state drives for data caching and high volume transactional applications.
“Sun continues to add significant capabilities to the Solaris OS, delivering sophisticated power management and performance for the datacenter and helping our customers protect their business continuity,” said Jim McHugh, vice president, Datacenter Marketing, Sun Microsystems. “With Solaris 10 10/09, installation, update and patch features have been enhanced to simplify system administration and reduce cost. In addition, Solaris ZFS has been updated to integrate Flash technology, the next revolution in storage hardware, into the operating system.”

To try out Solaris 10 10/09 see this page for a download, while for more info on the updates brought by this version click on this link.

So, one of the best gets better. I’ve had Solaris running before, and for some stupid reason I took it off the machine to try Windows Home Server – that was not a colossal mistake, but it was a small one, as Solaris was much cooler from a storage, learning, and coolness standpoint.

I am really excited to use ZFS, for as you might know, the Zettabyte File System  has been called the ultimate file system, allowing the user to add additional storage with little difficulty, and be self-healing (no more tales of the computer ate my data!)

from Wikipedia

In computing, ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed by Sun Microsystems. The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. ZFS is implemented as open-source software, licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The ZFS name is a trade mark of Sun.

History

ZFS was designed and implemented by a team at Sun led by Jeff Bonwick. It was announced on September 14, 2004.[3] Source code for ZFS was integrated into the main trunk of Solaris development on October 31, 2005[4] and released as part of build 27 of OpenSolaris on November 16, 2005. Sun announced that ZFS was included in the 6/06 update to Solaris 10 in June 2006, one year after the opening of the OpenSolaris community.[5]

The name originally stood for “Zettabyte File System”, the original name selectors happened to like the name, and a ZFS file system has the ability to store 340 quadrillion zettabytes (256 pebi-zebibytes exactly, or 2128 bytes). Every ZiB is 2**70 bytes.

So you as a voracious user, should still never in your lifetime run into a problem with running out of addressable storage – not even the most prolific digital packrat.

There are many other benefits to the Solaris operating system, but for me, ZFS is the shining jewel, and I am downloading the ISO as I write this.

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yes, Bob, unlimited addressable storage…