SCIENCE

PALO ALTO, CA -- Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) today announced a new set of upgrades and enhancements to the Solaris(TM) 8 Operating Environment (OE). The update introduces features that enhance the ability to install images of the Solaris OE and manage changes to the system software as well as performance improvements that enable five times greater web server performance. Solaris is part of the Sun ONE offering for smart web services -- an open, integratable product stack designed to enable the infrastructure required for robust web services. These enhancements address a user's need to continually improve resource utilization while increasing system capabilities. Solaris 8 OE update 07/01 makes it simpler for network administrators to improve performance on a variety of web servers and seamlessly take advantage of performance gains with minimal interruption in productivity. The new update also makes it much easier to manage hundreds of thousands of host addresses. In addition, Sun's introduction of Live Upgrade 2.0, now integrated with Web Start Flash, enables faster and more seamless operating environment upgrades, as well as the rapid deployment of a complete software environment. "We continue to see strong demand for our Solaris software products as customers are increasingly focused on better management and utilization of their IT resources," said Andy Ingram, Sun's vice president of marketing for Solaris Software. "With this update, we will deliver even more powerful tools to help our customers drive greater efficiencies, leverage existing investments, as well as better manage the system to admin ratio given today's growth in systems." "With better than a 40 percent share of the worldwide UNIX(R) server operating environment new license shipments in 2000, Solaris is the leading UNIX operating environment," said Al Gillen, research manager at IDC, referring to a recent IDC study entitled, "Worldwide Unix Operating Environments Market Forecast and Analysis, 2001-2005." "Solaris shipments jumped dramatically during 2000 as Sun experienced its best year ever, measured in both terms of shipments and revenue. IDC's study found that Solaris has the potential to claim a dominant position in the UNIX server operating environment market, and remains the brightest spot in UNIX." "We immediately saw a dramatic difference in the time required to execute an installation," said Bruce McPherson, senior IT manager, Commerce One. "We have been able to reduce our standard build time for a Solaris 8 OE installation from four and a half hours to merely 15 to 20 minutes. This reduction in time helps us to better utilize resources and promotes cost efficiencies. This time savings also affords our system administrators time to focus on issues that are really important to our customers such as overall system security, management, and ongoing user support." Enhancement Highlights: -- Live Upgrade 2.0 integration with Web Start Flash, provides a significant savings of time and effort for the system administrator, whether for an operating system upgrade or the installation of a complete software stack. There is less system downtime because live upgrade allows software to be loaded into a separate partition while the system continues to run. In addition, the separate partitions allow for a clean, fast rollback if there are unanticipated problems. Web Start Flash enables a proven new operating system or complete software stack to be replicated exactly and deployed on additional systems with greater accuracy and fewer errors. These newly integrated Live Upgrade and Web Start Flash features lead to higher service levels with lower administration costs. -- Network Cache Accelerator (NCA) socket support has been added to automatically increase the performance of most socket-based web servers without requiring any modifications. The NCA socket support makes it easier to manage web services across heterogeneous web servers including a significant time savings for service providers by not having to port web services to multiple web servers. The result is up to five times increased performance of web servers for service providers. -- Enterprise Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) can now support hundreds of thousands of hosts in a large corporate setting. Network administrators can save time and avoid the tedious manual allocation procedure for assigning IP addresses with this feature that provides central management of IP addresses for improved manageability and improved scalability, easily scaling from a few thousand clients to several hundreds of thousands clients. A full list of product features and enhancements can be found at: www.sun.com/solaris