INDUSTRY

New Release Simplifies Administration, Supports Virtualization and Consolidation for SPARC and x86 Systems: Sun Microsystems, the creator of Solaris, today announced the latest version of Solaris Cluster, Sun's premier business continuity and disaster recovery platform for the Solaris 10 OS. These enhancements support key reliability features of the Solaris 10 OS, making it even easier to use, further improving availability and providing greater flexibility. The new functions extend the reliability of the Solaris 10 OS to help keep databases, applications and services running 24/7 through routine maintenance, unplanned outages and even whole datacenter outages. Solaris Cluster is high-availability cluster software used to improve the availability of databases, file sharing services, websites, or other applications running on the Solaris OS. Solaris Cluster uses redundant computers to protect against downtime, eliminating the server as a single point of failure. With the Geographic Edition, Clusters can be combined across unlimited distances to provide business continuity even in the event of a data center failure. Cluster Advanced Edition for Oracle RAC offers enterprises increased manageability and availability for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) deployments for both SPARC and x64 platforms. Enhanced Support for Virtualized Environments Solaris Cluster provides expanded support for Solaris Containers virtualization software, enabling the consolidation of servers even in high-availability environments. These virtualization capabilities allow scalable or fail-over applications and associated Solaris Cluster agents to run unmodified within Solaris Containers. Improved Data Availability for Business With the virtually unlimited scalability of the Solaris ZFS (zettabyte file system), Solaris Cluster offers virtually the best-in-class file system solution for high availability, data integrity and flexibility for growth. More Applications Supported, Broader Choice of Storage Solutions Solaris Cluster now offers more third-party software configuration choices including replication software and storage solutions from leading vendors such as EMC, Hitachi, Oracle, and Symantec. "Customers are clear: they want solutions from multiple suppliers to work end-to-end and they need them to run 24x7. For our mutual customers, Solaris Cluster helps them do both -- it gives them new capabilities and is designed to work seamlessly with solutions from EMC. Both EMC and Sun are committed to the necessary development work that provides our customers with leading business continuity capabilities," said Chuck Hollis, Vice President of Technology Alliances at EMC. Simplified User Interface Reduces Deployment Costs With the new enhancements to Solaris Cluster it is now easier for administrators to configure popular applications. These enhancements include and easy-to-use agent builder, enabling system administrators to easily move applications to a high-availability environment. Other improvements include: - A simplified, browser-based configuration wizard and an easy-to-use interface for more intuitive interaction - A new Solaris Live Upgrade software procedure that minimizes the need to bring down the cluster services on a cluster being upgraded - A dual partition software update feature that reduces human errors by enabling administrators to automatically upgrade any component of the software stack along with Solaris Cluster A simplified setup of Oracle RAC that enables better integration of the Oracle 10g distributed database in a single high-visibility framework, for improved diagnostic capabilities. Solaris Cluster continues to leverage advanced Solaris 10 technology such as predictive self-healing, and runs on both SPARC and x64/x86 architectures. For more information or to download Solaris visit its Web site. For online training modules on Solaris Cluster, visit its Web site.