Jim Laurent's Weblog

Many of you have heard that Solaris 10 and open-source OpenSolaris runs on both SPARC and X86/X64 architectures.  You probably even know Solaris is available on both AMD and Intel processors in Sun servers as well as non-Sun platforms. In fact, Dell, IBM and Fujitsu/Siemens are Solaris OEMs on their platforms. You may even know that Solaris has set a number of world record benchmarks for scalability and performance on the Intel processor.  But do you really know how we did it? 

Sun and Intel work together on a number of areas in the Solaris OS and development tools including:

• I/O optimizations
• Scalability and performance
  
• Power Management
  
• Compiler optimizations
• Virtualization enhancements
• Fault Management
  

There are a number of resources available where you can learn why Solaris is a great choice on Intel XEON processors.

• Sun and Intel webcast
• Intel projects at OpenSolaris.org
  
• Solaris on Xeon whitepaper
• Solaris 10 05/08 and Intel enhancements video 
• OpenSolaris and Intel YouTube video produced by Intel 
• CPU Power management
• Episode #1 – Why Intel and OpenSolaris?
  
• Episode #2 – Power Management
• Episode #3 - Getting instant performance boosts
  
• Episode #4 – Predicitive Self-Healing
  
• Episode #5 – Virtualization
  
• Episode #6 – I/O Acceleration Technology
  

These are just a few of the projects that make Solaris run better than any other OS on Intel Xeon based processors.  Many more have been completed or are planned in the future including enhancement specifically for the Intel Nehalem microarchitecture

Download Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris today and try it out on your favorite Intel based PC, Server or Virtual Machine.