Synergy.

Intel has been developing hardware that takes advantage of the capabilities of Solaris, and Solaris has been optimizing its features to run on Intel platforms. Specifically, on the next-generation Intel Xeon processor.

Why should a sysadmin care? Because the capabilities that resulted from this collaboration will let you do get more work out of fewer resources while increasing reliability and saving energy.

Highlights:

• Performance: the combination of Intel's Hyper-Threading Technology and the Solaris multi-threading capabilities work together to increase the performance of multi-threaded workloads while reducing power consumption.
• Reliability: Intel's Machine Architecture Recovery feature works with the Solaris Fault Manager to detect memory and cache errors and correct them before they cause a fault.
• Power Efficiency: Intel's Intelligent Power Technology allows system administrators to set policies for the optimal mix of processing power and energy use, or Solaris to optimize it automatically.
• Flexible Virtualization: the OpenSolaris xVM hypervisor supports the virtualization capabilities of Intel's next generation Xeon processor, including network virtualization.

Details here:

• White Paper: The Solaris OS and Intel's Nehalem EX
• Nehalem-Related Resources on BigAdmin

- Rick