Patch Manager
New in 9

Provides automatic patch inventory and configuration-based analysis of systems, as well as automatic verification of digital patch signatures, and automatic resolution of patch dependencies and install order.

Reduces complexity and amount of time required to keep systems optimally configured with the latest patches for maximum system security and availability.

Modular Debugger (mdb) Enhancements
New in 9

This was introduced in the Solaris[tm] 8 platform and now mdb becomes the default system utility for low level debugging and editing of the live operating system in the Solaris 9 OE. It also facilitates analyzing operating system crash dumps, user processes, user process core dumps and object files. New features for the Solaris 9 OE include: new symbolic debugging support for the Solaris kernel, new kernel debugger commands, new features for examination and control of live running user processes and the ability to examine raw disk files and devices.

Applies modern techniques to debug applications programs. Provides tools to analyze core dumps for problem resolution.

Mitigation of Buffer Overflow Areas
New in 9

Ability to disable execution of code in the stack on a per executable basis.

Decreases the risk of exploits due to buffer overflow.

Solaris Live Upgrade 2.0

Solaris Live Upgrade technology enables the current running boot environment to be duplicated. While the original boot environment continues to run, the duplicate environment can be upgraded. The duplicate boot environment is then activated to become the active boot environment when the system is rebooted.

Since the system can be upgraded while the system is still running, downtime is reduced significantly. In the case of an upgrade failure, you can quickly fall-back to the original environment with a simple reboot, thereby eliminating the downtime for the production environment associated with normal test and evaluation processes.

Solaris Flash

This installation feature enables the creation of a reference installation of the Solaris Operating Environment and application software stack which can then be replicated on several machines. Customers can now rapidly provision thousands of complete systems over the LAN or WAN.

Significantly reduces installation time, configuration complexity, and administrative resources, while improving deployment scalability. Servers can be easily reprovisioned or retasked to a different service based on demand. In case of disaster, systems can be restored in minutes by reinstalling Flash archives, thereby providing a backup mechanism.

Solaris IP Multipathing (IPMP)

IPMP provides the system with recovery from single-point failures with network adapters while increasing traffic throughput.

Provides a robust, integrated solution for network interface failover and network traffic load spreading.

Reconfiguration Coordination Manager (RCM)

RCM allows third-party applications to be notified of a DR event so that they can reconfigure or notify the operator that DR cannot be performed.

Applications can automatically adapt to new hardware configurations without interruption of service.

Driver Fault Injection (Driver Hardening Test Harness)

This is a Solaris device driver development tool which injects a wide range of simulated hardware faults when the driver under development accesses its hardware. This fault injection test harness tests the resilience of a SPARC

Delivers higher availability for newly installed systems. .

Sun StorEdge[tm] Traffic Manager

Allows multiple paths for servers to connect with Sun storage disks.

Enables failover in the event of network I/O path failure. Enhances storage availability and allows the application to route traffic to the storage tier more efficiently.

Dynamic Kernel Updates

Allows Sun to add diagnostics and, in some cases, binary relief to the system kernel without interrupting the operating system and associated applications.

Increases availability. Sun can monitor and fix problems at customer sites without taking down production systems.

Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR)

With DR, processors, memory and I/O interfaces can be hot-plugged into Sun Fire[tm] V880, 3800-6800, and 15K servers, and dynamically configured into or out of the operating environment's domain.

Enables critical components such as CPUs, memory and I/O interfaces to be replaced with no downtime.

UFS Logging

UFS logging was introduced in the Solaris 7 OE as the process of storing transactions in a log before the transactions are applied to the UFS file system. Once a transaction is stored, the transaction can be applied to the file system later.

Prevents file systems from becoming inconsistent, therefore eliminating the need to run fsck(1M). Since fsck can be bypassed, UFS logging reduces the time required to reboot a system if it crashes or after an unclean halt.

Faster Reboot

When this was introduced in the Solaris 7 OE, it reduced the boot time up to 40% on reference configurations. It was further enhanced in the Solaris 8 platform by improving process so that hardware configuration is done in parallel and not sequentially.

Reduced system downtime delivers higher availability.

Asynchronous I/O

Asynchronous I/O support for tapes was added in the Solaris 2.6 platform and provides an interface to improve performance on high-performance tape devices.

With the ability to queue up I/O requests, this feature significantly improves the I/O throughput.

NFS Client Failover

This feature was introduced in the Solaris 2.6 OE. Client failover provides a high level of availability of read-only file systems by enabling the client to automatically mount the file system from another server if the first server becomes unavailable.

Easy configuration of redundant services for client systems.

Realtime Support

This was introduced in the Solaris 2.6 platform and significantly enhanced in the Solaris 8 OE. High-resolution, arbitrary, real-time timers have been added to improve the bounded interval response time for real-time event traps. These hardware timers do not rely on the system clock for dispatch, but instead deal directly with the hardware timer source. As a result, timer resolution is as fine grained as the platform is capable of providing, currently up to one nano-second resolution. Improvements have been made to event latency by assuring that any blocking thread -- of a lower priority than the real-time process -- has its priority increased to quickly complete and release the blocked resource.

The bounded interval response time has been improved for network events by ensuring that STREAMs processing allows for prioritizing network traffic based on its priority, in much the same fashion as the scheduler in the kernel does for process dispatching.

Provides fine grained monitoring of system availability. Improves system availability by preventing runaway realtime process from dominating system resources.