Solaris 10 simplifies systems administration

You may have heard Sun refer to Solaris 10 as the most advanced operating system on the planet.

But what does this mean for you?

If you're a systems administrator or developer, Solaris 10 can help make your job a whole lot easier. Three of the most powerful features of the operating system are Service Management Framework (SMF), DTrace and ZFS.

Self-healing with SMF

SMF is a core component of the predictive self-healing technologies introduced in Solaris 10. Self-healing technologies help maximise system availability in the face of software and hardware failures. They make systems administration easier, faster and more reliable and reduce the cost of ownership.

SMF automatically diagnoses and pinpoints the causes of service failures and restarts failed services without human intervention. If manual intervention is required, SMF helps system administrators to quickly identify the root cause of the service's failure to reduce time to repair and recover.

Download the How To Guide and learn how to use SMF to monitor and manage a Solaris 10 system.

Early identification of system problems with DTrace

DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for Solaris 10. It gives administrators, developers and service technicians a powerful infrastructure to examine the behaviour of programs and the operating system itself.

DTrace dynamically modifies the operating system kernel and user processes to record data at locations of interest. This enables you to:

• explore the system and understand how it works
• track performance problems across multiple layers of software
• find the cause of aberrant behaviour

DTrace can be safely used on production systems without restarting the system or applications.

Take full advantage of DTrace now. Download the How To Guide.

Ensure data integrity with ZFS

Solaris 10 includes the ZFS file system, which provides very high levels of data integrity and performance, and improves the ease of file system management by eliminating the need for a volume manager.

ZFS's storage capacity is held within an expandable pool called a zpool. Each zpool can hold multiple file systems and share capacity and input/output resources. This new architectural approach vastly improves administration of file systems and performance.

It has 128-bit capacity, which Sun expects will provide enough scalability to last up to 30 years. ZFS is also tightly integrated with Solaris Containers, Sun's operating system virtualisation technology.

Download the How To Guide and find out how to take advantage of ZFS when coupled with Solaris Containers.

Also, for more tips on how to simplify your systems administration with Solaris 10, visit Alan Hargreaves' blog: http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta/.

For more information on Solaris 10:
Contact your Sun account representative or email us