Friday, 12 January 2007

Sun Announces the Latest Version of Solaris Cluster

Sun, the creator of Solaris, has unveiled the latest version of Solaris Cluster, Sun's business continuity and disaster recovery platform for the Solaris 10 OS. According to the company, Solaris Cluster is high-availability cluster software used to improve the availability of databases...

Sun, the creator of Solaris, has unveiled the latest version of Solaris Cluster, Sun's business continuity and disaster recovery platform for the Solaris 10 OS. According to the company, Solaris Cluster is high-availability cluster software used to improve the availability of databases, file sharing services, websites, or other applications running on the Solaris OS. Solaris Cluster uses redundant computers to protect against downtime, eliminating the server as a single point of failure. With the Geographic Edition, Clusters can be combined across unlimited distances to provide business continuity even in the event of a data center failure. Cluster Advanced Edition for Oracle RAC offers enterprises increased manageability and availability for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) deployments for both SPARC and x64 platforms.

Solaris Cluster provides expanded support for Solaris Containers virtualisation software, enabling the consolidation of servers even in high- availability environments. These virtualisation capabilities allow scalable or fail-over applications and associated Solaris Cluster agents to run unmodified within Solaris Containers, the company said.

With the virtually unlimited scalability of the Solaris Zettabyte File System (ZFS), Solaris Cluster offers file system solution for growth, Sun added.

According to the company, other improvements include:

• A simplified, browser
• A new Solaris Live Upgrade software procedure that minimises the need to bring down the cluster services on a cluster being upgraded
• A dual partition software update feature that reduces human errors by enabling administrators to automatically upgrade any component of the software stack along with Solaris Cluster
• A simplified setup of Oracle RAC that enables better integration of the Oracle 10g distributed database in a single high-visibility framework, for improved diagnostic capabilities.
• Solaris Cluster continues to leverage Solaris 10 technology such as predictive self-healing, and runs on both SPARC and x64/x86 architectures.