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The new operating system has earned praise from industry critics and customers

Despite lacklustre sales since the dotcom implosion, United States-based Sun Microsystems has relied on two constants to keep it going: a US$7 billion cash pile, and the fanatical support of developers for its Solaris operating system.

Neither IBM's AIX nor Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX have managed to threaten Solaris as the Unix server of choice, although Linux is lurking in the background.

Now, the company hopes the release of its latest operating system, Solaris 10, will widen the distance with competitors and return Sun to sustained profitability.

The initial response has been good, with Solaris 10 earning praise from industry critics and customers who have had an advance look at the operating system, due for release in January.

'When you are not doing well, the competition gets to define who you are; when you are on top, you can define yourself,' chief executive Scott McNealy  said.

The most talked-about feature with Solaris 10 has been 'Dynamic Tracing', a technology developed by a team led by Bryan Cantrill,  an engineer who worked on the Solaris kernel.

'Most of the tools used for analysis are intended for developers,' Mr Cantrill said.

Programmers have various tools they can use on specially engineered versions of the operating system. Typically, the tools are intrusive, slow the whole system down and cannot be used in live, mission-critical systems.

Mr Cantrill began working on Dynamic Tracing - or DTrace, as it is known - more than four years ago. The goal was to create a tool that could monitor a live system to find bugs and problems, without interfering with its operation.

In demonstrations, DTrace showed how problems that sometimes could take weeks to work could be resolved in minutes. Outside consultants showed how they used DTrace to fix and manage systems on Wall Street where some of the most critical systems run.

One unresolved aspect of the launch is how Sun intends to open source Solaris.

Mr McNealy said the reason Sun had been slow with putting Solaris in the open source community was that the entire code had to be 'cleaned' up. This meant taking out and rewriting any code that did not belong to Sun or for which Sun had not bought the rights.

Some other features in Solaris 10 have been inspired by mainframe technologies.

Containers, for example, isolate processes on a single server so that if something goes wrong it will not disturb anything else.

Enterprises typically deploy several servers to keep critical applications separate - sometimes resulting in a single server running at just 15 per cent of capacity.

Consolidating servers with the help of containers would eliminate this waste and lead to cost savings.

'If you have a US$10 million grid of which only 15 per cent is being used, you are wasting US$8.5 million,' chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz said.

Sun engineers also demonstrated the system's predictive self-healing technology. In the example, the impending demise of a CPU in a multiple-CPU configuration was spotted, preventing a major breakdown.

Solaris 10 also represents the first time Sun has actively pushed the fact that the system runs on Intel-based microprocessors. John Loiacono, the new head of the company's software unit, said: 'We spent the past several years making Solaris x86 a first-class citizen.'

Much of the development of Solaris 10 was done on computers compatible with Intel.



Sun counts on Solaris 10 to outshine server competition