OpenSolaris opens for business

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 06 May 2008 06:55

Business IT - Open Source

The first supported release of the OpenSolaris operating system has arrived.

OpenSolaris is the open-source version of Sun's Solaris.

"It combines the strong foundation of Solaris technologies and tools with modern desktop features and applications developed by open source communities such as GNOME, Mozilla and the Free Software Foundation," said Stephen Lau, OpenSolaris governing board member.

Key features of OpenSolaris include the use of ZFS (Zettabyte File System), DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) and OpenSolaris Image Packaging System.

According to Sun officials, OpenSolaris is the first operating system with ZFS as its default file system. Its advantages include built-in rollback, the use of checksums and redundancy to transparently restore corrupted data, support for extremely large amounts of data (up to 16 exabytes), and the ability to expand a storage pool while the system is running.

DTrace provides a safe window into running systems that can be used to help with application development and system optimisation.

OpenSolaris Image Packaging System is an analogue of package managers found in Linux distributions.

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