Sun: the One Company that Can Put it All Together

History shows that the utility model is the natural destination of all resources for which demand is pervasive. Power. Water. Communications. And the progression is always the same: solutions are custom-built while the technology is immature and fragile; standards are established to make adoption easier; and finally pricing becomes transparent and the resource becomes commoditized.

Sun is uniquely positioned to bring that utility model to SaaS development and deployment because it is the one company that is integrated across all of the layers of technology involved—from open source application infrastructure and database platforms to server and storage systems.

Moreover, Sun’s technical innovations have helped solve some of the core security, privacy, and regulatory issues that were holding back the widespread adoption of the utility model. For example:

• Solaris Containers provide OS virtualization, making it possible to maintain a one-application-per-server deployment model while simultaneously sharing hardware resources. Solaris Containers isolate software applications and services using software-defined boundaries and allow many private execution environments to be created within a single instance of the Solaris 10 OS. Each environment has its own identity, separate from the underlying hardware, so it behaves as if it’s running on its own system making consolidation simple, safe, and secure. This makes it possible to reduce the administrative overhead and complexity of managing multiple operating systems and improve system utilization at the same time.

• Solaris Zones create a virtualized operating system environment within a single instance of the Solaris OS. This partitioning technology is used to provide an isolated and secure environment for hosting and running applications. A zone also provides an abstract layer separating applications from the physical attributes of the machine on which they are deployed. Examples of these attributes include physical device paths and network interface names. Zones can be used on any machine that is supported on the Solaris 10 release.

• Solaris ZFS is the advanced storage management facility that comes with the Solaris 10 OS. ZFS is much faster than other file systems, but its big advantage is its unlimited flexibility in pooling resources. A ZFS pool can be made up of any combination of devices, real or logical, that provide persistent storage. If it presents to the system as a disk or a file, ZFS can pool it. Most importantly, ZFS is practically unlimited. Pools can span virtually infinite numbers of devices and quantities of storage, and each pool can have a practically limitless amount of file systems on it.

• DTrace is a comprehensive, advanced tracing tool for troubleshooting systemic problems in real time. It is an integral part of the Solaris 10 OS. With DTrace, administrators, integrators, and developers can tune applications for performance and troubleshoot production systems—all with little or no performance impact. It is a key strategic tool in developing better-performing, higher-quality applications, helping developers save significant time and money when debugging complex problems.

• Sun xVM is a family of technologies addressing both the virtualization of individual servers and the unified management of the physical and virtual aspects of the datacenter. Sun’s virtualization strategy simplifies management (of business, applications, and data) to improve ROI and business agility, optimize efficiency and utilization and cut costs by extending virtualization across the entire IT infrastructure—from desktops, servers, OS, appliances, storage and the network.

• Security: Solaris 10 includes Process and User Rights Management, Trusted Extensions for Mandatory Access Control (MAC), and the Cryptographic Framework and Secure By Default Networking that allows developers to safely deliver new solutions, consolidate with security, and protect mission-critical data.

  “Sun is one of the last true platform companies; Sun has all the technologies in place to bring Project Caroline to fruition; and Sun has the commitment to ongoing R&D to keep improving on the core technologies that make Project Caroline feasible,” said Richard Zippel, Vice President of, Technology, Chief Technologist’s Office.

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