Q: Can you provide more detail about the "Yes -- out of the box"
answer to Fujitsu Primepower support. Will there still be a
technical/legal requirement to maintain separate patch lists for Sun
and Fujitsu servers?
Andy Ingram (A): As is the case today, most of the Solaris patches
are common. However, there are always software patches related to
hardware specific software such as OBP, post, service processors, low
level hardware drivers, etc. These will always be unique to the
specific hardware implementation.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I've heard that you've recently partnered with Fujitsu for chip
production. How soon can we expect Sun systems which utilize Fujutsu
processors? Will we be seeing 2GHz+ SPARC systems soon?
Andy Ingram (A): We announced a partnership with Fujitsu to
cooperate on the development, manufacture, and distribution of the
"Advanced Product Line" (APL). This is a complete family of SPARC
based systems designed to meet the needs of network computing. APL
will incorporate processor technology from both companies and share a
common operating system in Solaris 10. We have announced that these
systems will come to market in 2006. And yes you will see 2GHz+ in
SPARC systems but I am not disclosing exact the timeframe today.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: How much has been invested to harden Solaris 10 against virus
etc attacks?
David Comay (A): The primary improvments in this area are with
Solaris Containers and Process Rights Management. Containers allows
workloads or applications (think a CGI script) to be run in isolation
from other applications on the system. If an attacker was somehow able
to exploit a vulnerability, he would be isolated from other workloads
running in other zones. Also, Process Rights Management allows one to
remove privileges for an application, allowing it to run with just the
privileges it needs to perform its task.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What is special about the new storage products 6000?
Jason Schaffer (A): Sun's 6000 family of storage products is the
best in the industry. * The 6920, a new class of midrange system, has
industry leading features, such as N-way scalability (the ability to
scale performance, connectivity, capacity and data service resources),
centralized data services (the ability to share data services across a
wide range of hetergeneous storage and server environments),and
application-oriented management (the ability to provision and domain
storage by application. * The 6130, a baby brother to the 6920,
combines data services, a high-availability architecture, and
application-oriented management to deliver robust data protection for
cost-conscious enterprises.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I would like to see if automated patches distribution is in
plans fo Solaris OS, or at least an ability for administrators to
review the patches that has been downloaded overnight before
installation?
James Baty (A): Patch management is important and we are moving to
make it more automated. Patch Manager 2.0 Provides a patch list
mechanism that enables quick location of recommended patches and
supports Live Upgrade. This is available with Sun Spectrum Services of
Sun Preventive Services.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I noticed that Sun has finally released a storage array with
data services, the StorEdge 6130 FC Array. Is it fully supported with
Solaris 10? How about Solaris 10 on Opteron?
Jason Schaffer (A): Yes. The 6130 array has data services and
comes with both FC and SATA drive options, and is fully supported with
Solaris 10.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What improvements have been made around scalability in Solaris
10.
Andy Ingram (A): Given that most customers are currently running
Solaris 8, there are a significant number of improvements that most
customers will experience. The big news is in the tcp/ip stack,
threading model, memory placement/management, and in the ability for
Dtrace to unravel scaling issues.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Mark, are the licenses you have under consideration all
approved by the free software foundation?
Mark McClain (A): We're focused on ensuring our license is
OSI-approved. Some of them may also be approved by FSF. We'll look
into it.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What about the benefits of webhosting industry to use Solaris
10 instead Red Hat ?
Anil Gadre (A): We agree that it is a huge advantage because of a
range of things - core scalability, fundamentally better security,
self healing, containers that allow drving better utlizliation - all
of which are very attractive to the Service provider community
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What changes have been made to the default Solaris printing
infrastructure? Do you forsee moving to BSD lpr, or to CUPS anytime in
the future?
David Comay (A): Yes, the default Solaris printing infrastucture
is the same. However, we've been enhancing it by bundling Ghostscript,
Internet Printing Protocol support and other functionality.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hi, I know that Sun is rock solid at the Server side; We *had*
to migrate about 5000 users from iPlanet/JES to exchange 2003 because
of the rich features, GUI and web interface it provides. what will Sun
do to hold back other customers/install bases from migrating to
Exchage etc.. what about the *neat* features in JES?
Mark McClain (A): I'd have to understand the specifics of the
situation. We've done a number of exchange migrations to JES.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: How will Sun generate revenue enough to operate and enhance
their services and R&D if the new OS is free?
Anil Gadre (A): Increasingly the value in the software industry is
moving to services/support. Remember that Sun is a complete systems
company with offerings in Servers, storage, services, support,
software etc. Each of our offerings is designed to allow customers to
have the maximum in choice and ease of making a decision to bet on
Sun.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will JDS/Solaris be released in the consumer market in the
future?
Mark McClain (A): JDS is already available for consumers via
download and at WalMart! Solaris is downloadable for developers
(probably the only 'consumers' we are targeting with our OS).
______________________________________________________________________
Q: How i can create a dinamic managing interaction with web
services in solaris 10 plataform?
Bryan Cantrill (A): Hmmm...that's a bit tough to parse. Most of
the Solaris 10 technologies (Containers, ZFS, Zones, DTrace,
Predictive self-healing, etc.) allow the platform to be dynamically
managed.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Does Solaris 10 have use other than being a server operating
system?
Andy Ingram (A): Don't forget about Solaris's history as a
workstation/desktop operating system. Solaris 10 and JDS make a
powerful combination. We also see Solaris as being interesting in
certain Storage appliance applications.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Can anyone talk about the Enterprise Storage Manager? Have you
been working with EMC, Hitachi, IBM so their storage can be managed
from this one application?
Rich Napolitano (A): Yes, there is an upcoming release of ESM
which is based on the SMI-S standards, that will not only manage Sun
storage but third party storage as well. ESM represents the storage
Portal for all Sun and other vendor storage on the Sun platforms.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Oracle's RAC (cluster) systems heavily rely on a fast private
network for performance. Should I expect Solaris 10's new TCP/IP stack
to improve the performance of these systems?
Mike Shapiro (A): Oracle RAC will be available for Solaris 10 on
x86 and SPARC, and of course Solaris 10 has better TCP/IP performance.
We also have support for RSM on some hardware platforms for these
types of private local networks.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: are there plans to bundle sun cluster within a solaris 10
update?
Mark McClain (A): At this point, Sun Cluster will continue to be a
separate license. However, we are looking at ways to gain greater
adoption for much of our software, such as shipping a try-and-buy
version with Solaris, etc.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hi guys, congrats on the release. Will the N Grid feature be
integrated into Solaris 10 core and only the management tools sold? Or
is the N Grid feature a seperate package alltogether?
David Comay (A): First of all, we've renamed N1 Grid Containers to
just be Solaris Containers. And they're definitely included with the
OS - no extra charge required to use them. There are other unbundled
N1 products but the container technology comes integrated in with
Solaris for both SPARC and x86/AMD systems.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: For the hobbiest at heart, or the startup company, Sun hardware
has been traditionally too expensive to justify, causing many to make
the decision to go primarily windows, or purchase 3rd party hardware
and load Solaris. What steps is Sun taking to bring a competitively
priced hardware platform to market?
Scott McNealy (A): Check out our Opteron ws. Very low cost and
very fast. 1-2way. Run linux, Solaris, and windows, your choice.
sun.com
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello, any hints on the rollout of new SPARC (US-IIIi?) or x86
(AMD?) blades?
Anil Gadre (A): We are working on them. Stay tuned
______________________________________________________________________
Q: When should we expect Solaris 10 to ship officially?
Andy Ingram (A): January 31.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello Mr. Scott McNealy! Do You have some new comments about
future of Sun Workstation families? Is there any new multiprocessors
SPARC stations in the nearest future? What about 4-way Opteron powered
Java Workstations? Thank You in advance. Vladimir Krayushkin, ROY
International.
Scott McNealy (A): We just launched new 2-way Opteron ws that are
really hot. Great graphics. World class performance running Solaris or
Linux or Windows. Your choice. We will update them to 2-core Opterons
to effectively give you 4-way performance next year. We will also
update the Sparc ws line with faster chips too. Stay tuned. Scott
______________________________________________________________________
Q: will Sun, with the recently introduced and future NAS filers,
be able to compete with NetApp? Sun has a bad reputation when it comes
to NAS. What is Sun going to do about it?
Rich Napolitano (A): Yes. We are very excited about the NAS
products already shipped and the new onces in development. Many of our
customers have asked us to deliver these products to market. We will
see more and more commonality between our disk and NAS products and
more and more success stories from our customers. There is strong and
postive momentum building for all of the storage products including
NAS. Success breeds further success.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: In order to increase Marketshare penetration into companies
with a primarily WIntel environment, has Sun considered partnerships
with leading suppliers of that hardware? (HP/Compaq, Dell, IBM)?
Scott McNealy (A): Yes. We run on over 270 non Sun platforms
including from all of the companies you mention. You have choice and
we pay our reps the same whether they sell sun computers with Solaris
or competitors computers with Solaris. Same $s.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Java q: Sun's push of java into commerical games seems to have
faded a little - are there any new interesting developments on this
front?
Mark McClain (A): Check out java.com for the breadth of things
going on in this area. Our support to gaming has't faded one bit. How
many other companies like Sun have a "Chief Gaming Officer" (Chris
Mellissinos)?
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is ZFS going to be subject to a particular licensing scheme? or
it will be "everything for everyone, as much as you like?
Mike Shapiro (A): ZFS is part of Solaris 10. It has the same
license agreement as the rest of Solaris.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is Sun actively trying to form any partnerships to increase
it's marketshare, say for instance, trying to sell Solaris 10 as an
OEM loaded OS for HP/Compaq, Dell, or IBM hardware?
Anil Gadre (A): We would love to have Dell, HP or IBM as partners
for Solaris. Given that it is one of the few truly vendor neutral OSes
out there, we believe it would make a terrific addition to the choices
they can offer customers. None have an enteprise class Unix for their
x86 servers. We would be most pleased to have them offer Solaris on
their servers!
______________________________________________________________________
Q: do you have any guidelines about the number of containers on a
one or two cpu box (sparc)?
David Comay (A): It really depends on the type of workload. Each
container itself requires a mininum of about 100MB of disk space and
some amount of swap. The cost of adding an additional container is
mostly due to the workload running in that container.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: How does Solaris 10 compete with, enhance, or obviate more
robust 3rd party filesystems like Veritas' VFS?
Andy Ingram (A): There are a number of capabilities in ZFS that
make it attractive relative to other alternatives. For example, ZFS
obviates the need for a volume manager. However, the key is that we
are offering our customers a choice. They can choose to use Veritas
VxFs and VxVm to present a consistant file management experience
across multiple platforms or they can choose to use the inherent file
managemnt capabilties built into Solaris 10 and take advantage of the
performance and reliability inherent in tight integration of the
operating system.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: How does SCO feel about Sun's Open source Unix?
Scott McNealy (A): Not sure. Have not asked them, nor do we need
to as we have rights to do what we want with Solaris source and we can
indemnify our customers. Scott
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Project Janus should allow us to run Redhat certified binaries
on Solaris 10. Will it also allow us to use drivers written for
Redhat?
Mike Shapiro (A): No, Janus (aka Linux Application Environment) is
only for applications, not kernel software. But Solaris supports over
270 x86 systems. We also are leveraging the same OpenSource window
system device drivers and provide the XOrg server.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello Balint: since Scott is getting up there in age, who is
now the best hockey player in senior management?
Scott McNealy (A): Hey, what kind of question is that?! I may be
slower but I am using a longer stick! Too bad we might not have a
season this year in NHL. Sharks were going to be great. Scott
______________________________________________________________________
Q: so, if I was deciding whether to deploy suse linux or solaris,
what would be the number one reason why I should choose solaris x86?
Mark McClain (A): With no additional info, I'd say performance.
However, depending on the situation, it might be ISV support,
security, or the ability to support your suse linux app WITHIN a
Solaris container, and do both.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Can you comment about java performance on solaris 10
Chris Ratcliffe (A): Solaris 10 includes the 1.5 JVM which has
significant performance improvements over previous JVMs. In addition,
the overall work in Solaris 10 for improving performance translates to
better performance for Java as well.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What is the relationship between the Solaris-based JDS 2 and
Solaris 10? Does Solaris 10 include the JDS components, or will they
be released as a separate product?
Bryan Cantrill (A): The Java Desktop System is a desktop
environment that runs on Solaris 10 and Linux. JDS is part of Solaris
10 and is available today in the latest Solaris Express release.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Apart from Common Criteria certification, will Solaris 10
provide the same level of security as Trusted Solaris currently does?
Bryan Cantrill (A): Not quite -- it's missing some of the add-on
technology like data labelling. The important bit is that the
foundation is the same: when Trusted Solaris 10 is released, it will
not need to deliver its own kernel and system libraries. That said,
the new security infrastructure in Solaris 10 considerably narrows the
security gap between stock Solaris and Trusted Solaris.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hey, Scott, will you get Microsoft to join the Liberty
Alliance?
Scott McNealy (A): You will have to ask MSFT that question. IBM
finally saw the light and joined recently. Who would have thought so
many years ago that MSFT would drop LanManager and go TCP/IP. Stranger
things have happened but I would not hold your breath. But the rest of
the world has gone Liberty.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will you be spending more dollars on advertising? Still, many
folks in the marketplace have a pessimistic view of sun and overly
optimistic view of redhat/linux.
Anil Gadre (A): We are focusing our Ad$ more online but will also
have a print presence. We also drive a varietyof other efforts like PR
which help turn the perception around. - Tell the story to others if
you like it!
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What does DTrace offer more than stack trace?
Adam Leventhal (A): google: dtrace -- check out our USENIX paper
on what DTrace is. DTrace does so much more than just printing a stack
trace: you can record arbitrary data, and take abritrary actions
anywhere on the entire system.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Do containers provide process isolation? And, can you point me
to a white paper, or additional information that describes the
container model?
David Comay (A): Yes, containers to provide process isolation.
Processes that run within a container only see processes running in
the same container. They cannot see or affect processes running in
other containers. A good, brief introducion to the container model can
be found in the following USENIX VM '04 paper
http://www.usenix.org/events/vm04/wips/tucker.pdf There is additional
informatiom from the S10 page http://www.sun.com/solaris/10 and the
container documentation athttp://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-1592
______________________________________________________________________
Q: When will Sun Cluster be supported on Solaris 10, and will it
be zone aware?
Larry Wake (A): First Solaris 10 support will be shortly after
Solaris 10 goes out the door; zone awareness will be in the second
half of 2005.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What does Sun's deal with the "devil" i.e. Microsoft mean for
the integration between the two operating systems, spec. Solaris 10 ?
Mark McClain (A): Now, that's a bit harsh, isn't it? "Devil" is
pretty strong. That said, we will be holding a press/analyst briefing
in a few weeks with Bill Gates and Greg Papdopoulos, our CTO, to
update customers on our progress. Interoperability, especially around
directories, is high on the list.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: With so many people saying Sun is yet to climb out of its hole,
how important do you rate Solaris10 in that process & is it the only
major launch in the pipeline?
Anil Gadre (A): We have had 2 quarters of growth in a row. We
announce a major group of producs every 90 days at our NC events. Next
one coming in 90 days. This year we have refreshed the entire product
line - servers, storage, software and servcies too.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Can Solaris run ALL Linux software? How can that be
accomplished? Any performance penalties?
Larry Wake (A): Even Linux can't run ALL Linux software! :-)
Solaris 10 is designed to run all LSB-compliant software, or more
broadly speaking, it should run any software that does not require
kernel extensions. Performance characterization so far has been
excellent -- within 1-4% of performance on Linux on the same
hardeware.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is the predicative self-healing in Solaris 10 available on x86
platform? For example, if one DIMM is going bad on my x86 PC server,
will Solaris 10 x86 safely bypass the defective part?
Mike Shapiro (A): Yes, Predictive Self-Healing will support x86
systems. The Service Manager is common and runs on both x86 and SPARC
today (and in Solaris 10 G/A in January). The x86 Predictive
Self-Healing support for the Fault Manager (for CPUs, memory and I/O)
is scheduled to appear in Solaris 10 Update 1, early next year.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: is right to still think about tapes, L 500, while companies
like EMC are moving to use only disks ??
Rich Napolitano (A): The demise of tape have been proclaimed for
the last twenty years. There is a new tier of disk based storage
systems emerging which are based on SATA and content s/w. However, for
many applications, customers still require offsite, secure and
persistant storage that will last for decades. Yes, L800, tapes will
last for a long time. There is a place in the world for disk and tape
based backup systems, we expect to see more use of BOTH disk and tape
based backup systems.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: The success of any software depends on the variety of software
that runs on it. Will Solaris 10 come with any development tools to
encourage software development?
Adam Leventhal (A): DTrace is the most compelling tool for
developers since the invention of the compiler. It changes the way
code is developed, debugged and performance tuned both in development
and on production systems.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hi Scott, I am an investor in Sun. Love what you have been
doing, pushing Sun in the right direction. It is a long hard road but
glad you are still running Sun. My question is what are the changes
you still want to implement at Sun ? Keep up the good work.
Scott McNealy (A): Some of the changes I cant talk about til I get
them solidified under contract. We still need to lower the breakeven
with some of the structural moves we are making, but most of the
financial model changes will come through growth. My major focus is on
driving customer useful innovation, community development, and quality
in all products and services. ANd I am a cash manager. GAAP is useful
but cash totally matters. thanks for your support. SCott
______________________________________________________________________
Q: ipfilter... why write a new dandy fast ip stack and the clogg
it up with ipfilter?
Bryan Cantrill (A): ipfilter is srictly optional; you need not
run it if you don't want to run it.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is Solaris 10 free to use for x86 computers? :P
Andy Ingram (A): Yes
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Anil, where will we see the new advertising?
Anil Gadre (A): We are advertising world wide with a heavy
emphasis on online advertising. This morning we ran the Solaris launch
ads in the WSJ and other selected print vehicles.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Besides ZFS, are there any other exciting features we may see
in future updates that just didn't make this 10 release?
Tom Goguen (A): There are a couple of others -- The Linux
Applications Environment will be coming in an update and we have an
improved x86 install and boot coming later as well.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Can resource allocation between containers be dynamically and
automatically managed? For example, should a particular container
require additional compute resource during it's batch run from
midnight to 2am, could compute resources be automatically and
dynamically removed from an OLTP container and allocated automatically
to the batch container only during this programmed period?
David Comay (A): Yes, this resource allocation can indeed be
managed dynamically. By setting up Dynamic Resource Pools (see the
relevant documentation at http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-1592), one
can set objectives to be met and when those objectives are not being
met, compute resources are moved automatically from one pool to
another to meet the objective in question.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is Solaris10 includes cluster services as well, if so any
modifications/advantages of implementing Cluster services in Solaris
10?
Mike Shapiro (A): Sun's Cluster product will support Solaris 10
and the advantages will be that when deploying on Solaris 10, you get
to use and benefit from all the other Solaris 10 features. Better
performance with FireEngine. Each node will be more reliable through
Predictive Self-Healing. The ability to use the ZFS filesystem and
Containers. So Solaris 10 is complementary to your cluster
deployments.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: have you had any large orders for solaris 10 yet that you feel
may act as a tipping point for broader acceptance by thte marketplace?
if so describe
Anil Gadre (A): Solars 10 has been in early access and has had
over 500,000 downloads/licenses. This is likely to drive much faster
adoption than every before. Separately, look at the ISV support. That
is a good leading indicator
______________________________________________________________________
Q: will dtrace be available for earlier solaris releases (8 , 9 )
?
Bryan Cantrill (A): No, DTrace will only be available on Solaris
10.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is it easier to develop drivers in Solaris 10?
Bryan Cantrill (A): Absolutely -- DTrace is a driver writer's
best friend! See the "Solaris Dynamic Tracing Guide" for details.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: McNealy, McClain, Baty, O'Brien, Rollender: Do any of you run
Solaris on your business desktops?
James Baty (A): Within Sun we use Sun Rays running Solaris/JDS as
our desktop platform - it not only provides full functionality, but we
also have the advantage of total enterprise mobility. We can unplug
our Java card Sun badges and transfer our desktop session to other Sun
Rays, in the building, or another campus. Files, profiles,
applications follow you globally.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: In consideration to packet-per-second processing. Is solaris
10 clocked at performing better or worse than the fbsd kernel?
Adam Leventhal (A): In Solaris 10, our packet-per-second
processing is number 1.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Just wondering, from a business standpoint. How do you see the
role of Solaris 10 in your business model?
Scott McNealy (A): It is the razor. Everything else is the blade.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: laptops running Solaris 10, eh? Do Sun executives use their
own products, namely Solaris 10 and/or JDS, on their business
desktops?
Scott McNealy (A): I run JDS. Why would anyone need anything
else. Runs wireless and wireline broadband connections, Java browswer,
StarOffice, and GAMES too! No MSFT viruses. Come see it. Way cool.
China and Japan cant be wrong. All of our employees have just upgrades
to JDS UI on Solaris and Linux. OUr CIO did it in three days to 30,000
desktops for $60k. Amazing. And did I say it is really cool? Scott
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will Solaris 10 make rich media delivery better?
Tom Goguen (A): Yes, Solaris 10 will provide significant overall
performance improvements. In particular we have revamped the TCP/IP
stack to deliver the performance demanded by modern workloads such as
streaming media. Additionally customers using DTrace have found
stunning performance improvements in what they throught were already
highly optimized applications.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: When are we likely to see a JDS for Solaris 10?
Andy Ingram (A): It is there in the first release and can be
downloaded today via software express.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Keeping up with soft partitions can get tough when one has
lots of soft partitions on one or more underlying device(s). Is this
something that's recognized as an improvable aspect of the SVM?
Mike Shapiro (A): The biggest innovation in making storage easier
to use is ZFS, which eliminates the entire concept of volume
management and managing underlying devices. ZFS will be part of
Solaris 10 next year and you can find out more at
sun.com/software/solaris/10/
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What does the ISV support look like for Solaris 10 and when
will it be up to the number of companies supporting Solaris 9?
Mark McClain (A): The ISV support for Solaris 10 is very strong.
This morning we announced support from SAP. They join BEA, Veritas,
CA, and many, many others. The only notably absent major vendor is a
three-letter company based in NY. In terms of volume, we announced the
"10 Moves Ahead" program for our ISV partners today. The volume is
building quickly.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Dear sirs! Concerning new Fujitsu-Siemens policy - what about
TI cooperation in the future? Is Solaris 10 and later will be
supported only in the new platforms: FSC and AMD? Thank you in
advance. Vladimir Krayushkin, ROY Intl.
Anil Gadre (A): TI is a great and solid partner for SPARC and
will continue to be. Solaris is supported on SPARC, Intel and AMD
processors both 32 bit and 64bit.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is there any easy-to-use profiling software built around
DTrace that can give an easy to comprehend, graphical representation
of how and where the system is spending most of its time?
Adam Leventhal (A): The analyzer software in Studio 10 uses
DTrace, but there are no graphical tools built around DTrace that we
ship with Solaris 10. We're working on new graphical tools around
DTrace as are several 3rd party shops. But DTrace is easy to use and
you can start profiling with out any fancy graphical tools. Try this
out and see what you're app is doing: dtrace -n profile-97'/execname
== "myapp"/{ @[ustack()] = count(); }'
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Does Solaris 10 supports wireless communication?
Chris Ratcliffe (A): Yes, in fact some of us are actually doing
this event on Solaris 10 on laptops running wirelessly.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: how does pridictive self healing work?
Jack O'Brien (A): see the whitepaper at sun/com/msg
orsun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Does Solaris automatically release unused CPU cycles from
containers that have ostensibly fixed CPU requirements (i.e. 1/2
processor)?
David Comay (A): Yes, when using the Fair Share Scheduler, any
unused processor cycles are "made available" to our workloads and
containers that are sharing the same resource pool.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I heard the short summary of Solaris 10. Many man hrs and many
dollars spent. With so many industry first features, why is open
sourcing a good idea?
Scott McNealy (A): We are lowering the barriers to entry for
developers. Commercial orgs will still want service and support and
will pay for it. Open sourcing will create more content on Solaris
which we can monetize. Plus, it creates great buzz! ANd gets the
community helping make our product better, lowering our cost of
development.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will sun be offering a version of the JDS for Solaris 10?
Andy Ingram (A): Yes
______________________________________________________________________
Q: To all, Does Sol10 have a GUI package manager?
Larry Wake (A): Not at this time.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: With all the improvements to the operating system has any work
been done to make easier to use as a workstation OS, for example is it
any easier now to setup a modem. Liked the new shutdown feature in the
new gnome interface beats having to do a command login just to shut
your workstation down. Basically has any work been done on usability?
Mike Shapiro (A): I'll mention two usability improvements as
examples: one for desktop users and one for admins. For desktop users,
we've got the new Java Desktop System integrated into Solaris 10,
including the latest Gnome window manager for a much nicer
look-and-feel. For admins, Predictive Self-Healing includes a new
Service Manager (see sun.com/bigadmin/content/selfheal for more) that
provides a simple, unified interface for managing services on Solaris
systems.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What is Sun doing to ensure more hardware compatibility w/ the
latest hardware (ACPI, Video, Sound, USB Devices, etc). How closely is
Sun workng with the vendors to get them to release NIX drivers?
Jack O'Brien (A): working with as many hardware vendors as
possible. We recently announced a partnership with nVidia for example.
there are over 250 devices and 270+ platforms supported today see:
sun.com/bigadmin/hcl
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is this launch event only about Solaris?
Anil Gadre (A): No, there are 20+ other things being announced
ranging from new NAS storage, archiving/compliance appliance, Nauticus
box (Secure App server), Studio 10, New Java VM, tons of apps ISVs, a
new ISV program , Service optimized datacenter solution and MORE!
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Besides the HCL, have you had much luck with 3rd party vendors
providing native support drivers for Solaris 10 x86?
Larry Wake (A): Yes. We're getting a lot of interest from vendors
that we'd not seen before.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: how can Sun make more money?
Scott McNealy (A): Drive volume. The more servers, Solaris
instances and Java applications that exist in the market, the bigger
the total available market (TAM) for our cpus, dram, disk, services.
Volume is the leading economic indicator.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will scripts written under Solaris 8 or previous versions
require any adjustments to any potential command ["name"] changes in
Solaris 10?
David Comay (A): Yes, scripts written under previous versions of
Solaris will continue to work, unchanged, under Solaris 10. Of course,
there are many enhancements including new command options, but none
that have been introduced will cause any incompatibility.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: any improvements in the area of keeping the OS patch level up
to date?
James Baty (A): This is a great question and includes
improvements in two areas - tools and services. Our N1 Grid
Provisioning Server technology can be leveraged for provisioning the
OS. In addition, Sun Services offers remote services, through Sun
Preventive Services, which enable us to help monitor and maintain
customers' patch levels.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will Solaris 10 be certified to run in virtual machines on
VMware ESX server?
Jack O'Brien (A): solaris is supported as a guest os on VMWare
today we are working with vmware on additional support
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hi Mark McClain. what are the future plans to Sun? How can sun
survive with linux, intel and low prices machines?
Mark McClain (A): Hi back to you. The focus of today's
announcements is that very question. With a commitment to support
Linux on our x86 servers, and the ability to run Linux applications in
a Solaris 10 container, improving both the performance and
availability of the application. The model is shifting in the
industry. Money will not only come from software and hardware, but
from managed services. Sun is at the forefront of that trend with
today's announcements.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What is Sun's stratgey on Blades? When will Sun have Optron
Blade Servers?
A: Be assured that we are actively working on blades. This is one
of the areas that Andy Bechtolsheim is focused today. They key will be
to support both Opteron and SPARC blades in the same infrastructure
while making sure that the economics pays off. That is that blades are
more economical than normal rack servers. This is not the case with
most blade servers. While this venue is not the right place to
announce our strategy, be assured we are working hard.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will Solaris run on the PowerPC Platform?
Anil Gadre (A): Market demand will dicate our support for
processors. Tell IBM if you want it!!
______________________________________________________________________
Q: You announced today that Solaris 10 will be free (as in beer);
what are the terms of this free license? I (and many other
enthusiasts) run Solaris on old Sun HW, e.g., the Ultra 60) that was
NOT bought from Sun or an authorised VAR. Under the terms of the old
"free" license, we could not legally run Solaris. Has this changed?
Rich Teer
Adam Leventhal (A): Solaris 10 will be free as in speech, but the
terms of the license haven't been decided upon yet. Expect this to be
announced within the next 3-6 months. You can now legally run Solaris
on those old boxes -- Solaris right to use is free.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Have you addressed the issues that earned Solaris the nickname
"Slowaris"?
Mike Shapiro (A): Yes, absolutely. A ton of performance work has
gone into Solaris 10, including large-scale subsystem improvements
(FireEngine TCP/IP, ZFS filesystems), micro-optimizations (many system
calls made faster), and h/w optimizations (taking advantage of the
SSE/SSE2 instruction sets on x86 systems for things like bcopy etc).
All this adds up to big performance wins over previous versions, and
makes Solaris 10 the fastest OS (and 64-bit) on the latest x86
hardware.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: So, I could cluster two boxes, one x86 and one SPARC both
running Solaris 10 ? They are precisely the same OS, regardless of the
chip architecture ?
Jack O'Brien (A): not with sun cluster but if you mean a
networked cluster (for a web farm for example) that is supported
______________________________________________________________________
Q: When will we see software like QFS, sun cluster, veritas VM
etc being supported on Solaris 10 machines?
Chris Ratcliffe (A): Most Sun products will be available on
Ssolaris 10 at, or shortly after shipment. Most major commercial apps
will be available on Solaris 10 within six months of shipment. Please
talk to your vendor for specific details.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hi Balint, Can I setup solaris 10 as a heartbeat server for
another server?
Tom Goguen (A): Sorry but Balint wasn't available. An upcoming
release of Sun Cluster software will be available for Solaris 10.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I've used several flavors of Unix, including Solaris from 4
thru 8. One downside, most of the others (HP-UX, AIX) have a decent
menu driven administration tool. Sun had Admintool, but is removing
that. What will you be doing to make administration easier ?
David Comay (A): One of the many pieces of open source software
that has been integrated into S10 is the popular webmin software which
will help in this area. In addition, the SunMC product is also
available and can be invaluable in managing a large number of systems
in a network.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Sun has been talking about releasing Solaris under some sort
of Open Source licensing, what is hapening in htis regard?/
Anil Gadre (A): We are working hard on this. We learned back in
2000 that source alone isnt enough. Community matters a great deal
more
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What will be the licensing model of open solaris.
A: If you mean what open source license will we use, we have not
finalized that decision. We have narrowed it to 3 options, all of
which are OSI-approved.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello together, my question is the following: do you see
Solaris (esp. x86) more as platform to run commercial, certified
applications (JES, Oracle, SAP, etc.pp.) on or also as a stable
base-OS for OpenSource applications. If yes, how do you plan to make
available (or help make available) these in way that requires the
least effort for administrators. I'm thinking along the lines of the
FreeBSD "ports-system", where a framework is provided to build
thousands upon thousands of applications and create re-deployable
packages from them for a large variety of configurations and
modifications without much hassle. Or have you not thought about that
? ;-)
Larry Wake (A): We're thinking about everything! Yes, we want
Solaris to be the commercial platform of choice on both SPARC & x86;
we also want to be considered one of the key platforms where open
innovation happens. The good news is we've had a strong history of
both for the last couple of decades. So yes, a "ports" like delivery
mechanism is on the list -- stay tuned.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hi, how focussed is Sun on bringing Sun's quality and
reliability into the more mass-consumer market?
Anil Gadre (A): The best example of this is the Java technology
for cell phones and Java cards. There are hundered of millions
deployed in mass cosumer apps. By the way, the recognition of Java the
brand is very high among teenagers and non-technical consumers!
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Your website turns me off, It's often ugly like when you view
products and services. Will sun release a new website like they did
for for the java site and others?
Jack O'Brien (A): in fact the sun.com web site is going through a
redesign. you should be seeing changes in the next several weeks
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Many would like to hear the answer from the horse's mouth to
this question: What is Sun's official position on releasing the source
code to Java under a royality-free licence in the next year?
Mark McClain (A): Am I the "horse"? :-) While we are currently
supporting a capabilty we call "visible development" which allows
folks in the community to see the source, but not modify it, we are
carefully evaluating future steps with Java. I would encourage you to
look at java.net for a look at the breadth of open source Java
projects underway.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello... Can u tell us more about the self healing
technologies?
Mike Shapiro (A): Self-healing provides automated restart of
software apps, and automated diagnosis and isolation of faulty I/O,
CPU, and memory components. You can read more about it by downloading
the free white paper at http://www.sun.com/msg/. And stay tuned for a
piece in the December issue of ACM Queue magazine.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Are you confident that you're going to now take a serious
share of the business OS market now?
Anil Gadre (A): I would say that we have a serious share of the
business OS market now if you look at our Unix server share and all
the business ISVs who run on Sun. The download data on Solaris x86
through the free solaris program suggests that we have a huge latent
community ready for more.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello all, Is Sun Services actually going to sell compute
time, or are you just saying you have the infrastructure to enable
VARs to sell compute time. Who is maintaining the grid, and who is
collecting the subscription revenue? Is automated billing a part of
your N1 grid solution.
James Baty (A): Sun is going to offer a range of compute
infrastructure alternatives. With our "N1 Pay-per-Use" program we will
be offering low cost grid computing cycles directly. At the same time
Sun will definately partner with Service Providers to enable them to
offer this capability. And we sill also enable business to offer grid
computing as an internal resource. The Utility Computing for High End
Grid is another program that provides pay-per-use of larger enterprise
resources. These programs will include a range of subscription models.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Does Solaris 10 offer any Server virtualization solution? Is
this what you call OS containers?
David Comay (A): Yes, Solaris Containers is a solution for server
virtualization (of course, we continue to support Domains on many of
our high-end platforms like the SunFire F15K and F25K). Containers is
built into Solaris 10 (no extra license fee required) and allows one
to consolidate many systems on to a single Solaris 10 system where the
workloads in each container are isolated from one another. Please see
http://www.sun.com/solaris/10 for more information and
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-1592 for the documentation on this new
technology.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Are there differences between the x86 and Sparc
implementations of 10, and if so, what are they?
Adam Leventhal (A): In terms of functionality, there's little to
no difference between Solaris 10 on x86 and SPARC. We have the
absolute minimum amount of architecture-specific code -- the less we
have the less there is to maintain. The architecture-specific code we
have mostly handles machine-specific functions or low-level support.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I saw a post on x86 laptops running Solaris 10. Am I dreaming
? Solaris will be open source , can we run it on (cheaper) Ultrasparcs
?
Jack O'Brien (A): see supported hardware list for all hardware
including laptops. sun.com/bigadmin/hcl. yes solaris will be open
source for all supported platforms
______________________________________________________________________
Q: The installer in Solaris 9 wasn't all that great, sometimes it
reminded me of a BSD installer. Will you release a new user friendly
installer for solaris?
Larry Wake (A): There is indeed a new installer underway for
Solaris -- it'll be out in either the first or second Solaris 10
update. Much simpler, and maybe a bit more familiar to those used to
other boot/install technologies.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: SUN also announced an "Application Switch". How is it better
than the Cisco Content Switch?
Matt Rollender (A): The Sun Secure Application Switch offers a
new price/performance point in application switching. It can
drastically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership and improve application
performance in the data center by offering high performance
networking, integrated security, and virtualization services.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Schwartz previously said that TrustedSolaris will die and all
versions of Solaris will be 'trusted'..... Is Solaris 10 trusted or is
this still to come?
Mike Shapiro (A): Unlike previous Solaris versions, Trusted
Solaris is no longer a special kernel consisting of the base Solaris
plus the security features. The security features and about 80% of
Trusted Solaris are built in to Solaris 10, and then the labeling and
military-grade options are added on top as a set of packages that
comprise Trusted Solaris. Solaris 10 does have least-privilege
security that you can use out-of-the-box if you want to leverage this
aspect of Trusted without the rest.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: When wil I be able to download and use the final release of
solaris 10?
Mark McClain (A): We anticipate a revenue release of Solaris in
Jan 2005, which will be 'final' (same as GA).
______________________________________________________________________
Q: what about trusted solaris? or will you cooperate with argus
and include pitbull to provide features like mandatory access control
or sensitivity labels?
Larry Wake (A): A major chunk of what used to be unique to
Trusted Solaris is now directly integrated into Solaris 10. What's
very cool about this is that to get the remaining 20% onto the system,
we no longer have create a separate distro with a completely different
kernel -- sometime within a few months of Solaris 10 release, we'll
deliver a "labelled security" package that works with the existing
kernel. This gives us all the functionality people expect from Trusted
Solaris, but also gives us instant access to hardware and certified
software -- plus, we're no longer dependent on special file system
versions.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: To my understanding, there is code in solaris that will have
to be re-written if you were to open source it. Is this true?
Jack O'Brien (A): we will ensure we have the rights to any code
that we open source
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is it true that the same binaries are going to be able to run
on both solaris 10 x86 and on sparc and also linux binaries? How is
this possible?
Bryan Cantrill (A): No such technology is available at this time;
if such a technology were to become available from Sun, details would
be made available at that time.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Does XFS become the new default filesystem in Solaris 10?
Chris Ratcliffe (A): UFS remains the default filesystem for the
time being. ZFS will become the dafault at a later date.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: The hardware support for Solaris 10 on x86 systems has
historically been lacking. Has this been improved, such that more (and
newer) video cards, NIC's, etc will be supported?
Tom Goguen (A): Solaris 10 is now supported on over 270
platforms. Check out sun.com/bigadmin for the current hardware
compatibility list.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: With the open-sourcing of Solaris, how is paid maintenance and
support affected?
A: The two are unrelated. Today we announced a free right-to-use
for Solaris 10, with no support other than security patches. We will
continue to offer a "Sun-branded" version of Solaris with paid
maintenance and support, after we have released Solaris into the open
source community.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: There are many new features in Solaris 10 - the Zones, for
example. We are playing with this on a trial-and-error basis. Best
practices on how to do things are probably not available yet. But what
about example configurations - how to setup a "nice", clean Solaris 10
installation with Zones. Have you written documents on this? Not just
the manual pages...
David Comay (A): First of all, please check our Zones and
Resource Management documentation from
http://docs.sun.com/db/doc/817-1592 for more information about
creating some typical configurations. We are also writing up some
white papers and reference documentation on how to optimally configure
Zones for certain workloads such as web servers, databases, etc.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello Mr. Leventhal! And how will Oracle 10g (under new
Solaris) licensing be affected by dual (and more) core cpu's when they
become available? Thank you in advance. Vladimir Krayushkin, ROY Intl.
Adam Leventhal (A): Under Oracle's current licensing scheme
they'll charge per core. Obviously, we'd rather they charged per
physical CPU package. The more voices Oracle hears protesting this,
the better.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Was the purpose of ZFS to do away with Sun's partnership with
Veritas?
Chris Ratcliffe (A): No not at all, VERITAS is a great partner
for Sun. ZFS has been designed specifically to free system
administrators and businesses from the limitations of current file
system management technologies. Solaris 10 provides self healing data,
reduced system administration overhead and infinite scalability.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Does SSH in Solaris 10 support GSS (Keberos ticket)
authentication? How easy is it to integrate Solaris 10 into my
existing Kerberos realm?
Mike Shapiro (A): Yes, SSH supports GSS authentication. Solaris
has full Kerberos client support built in, so it should be easy to
integrate into your realm. You can also configure NFS on Solaris (v3
or v4) to use Kerberos as its authentication mechanism.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: One of the things that's kept me from using solaris is support
for different types of hardware (video cards, sound cards, etc). What
manufacturers/vendors are developing drivers that run natively on
solaris?
Larry Wake (A): We're recruiting more every day, but more
exciting to me, we're getting people knocking on our door asking to
join in. nVidia and Emulex are a couple we can name today -- stay
tuned!
______________________________________________________________________
Q: will sun support solaris 10 on current fujitsu primepower
models
Bryan Cantrill (A): Yes -- out of the box.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I'm really glad you're taking Solaris 10 Open Source. Does
that mean just for x86 or all platforms? And when will it happen.
We're getting tired of hearing about it.
Tom Goguen (A): Great! We're excited too. We be doing this for
both the SPARC and x86 platforms. We will have more to say within the
next 60 to 90 days.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: when is Solaris 10.0 gong to be open-src? and to what extent?
To developers, it makes a huge difference to develop applications on
OS/VM with source code ..
A: We've continued to reinforce our plans to opensource Solaris.
The intent is to opensource effectively 100% of the product. We are
still working through some thorny final issues around certain drivers.
Our goal is to give our development community full access to the
source and encourage a robust community.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I am coming for Linux world, Can I use rpm commands for
package management in Solaris 10?
Mike Shapiro (A): You can use RPM package commands to manipulate
Linux packages on Solaris. Solaris packages (e.g. for the OS itself)
come in our Solaris package format, and you use the Solaris pkgadd(1)
et al commands to administer them.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What exactly do I need to do to run Linux apps w/o change? How
do you handle library calls, etc?
Jack O'Brien (A): activating janus is the mehcanism for handling
the system calls. The Solaris kernel executes the system call either
to a solaris library or a linux library. appropropriate linux
libraries need to be loaded
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will Sun hardware be cheaper in order to use Sparc hardware
platforms with Solaris?
James Baty (A): Yes - Sun will focus on price/performance, not
just on Opteron but also Sparc. Note that the performance inprovements
of Solaris 10 result in dramatic improvements in price/performance
especially when you factor in the TCO costs of administration and
support.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What makes Solaris 10 a better OS for the average user(non IT)
as compared to other operating systems like linux or Windows?
Bryan Cantrill (A): Sure -- but the non-technical user will
probably best appreciate Solaris by the problems that they don't have.
Solaris -- by its architecture -- attempts to solve as many problems
automatically as possible. And in Solaris 10, we have added rich new
infrastructure for service management, fault recovery and self-healing
data. So yes, Solaris 10 is absolutely a better OS -- for _all_ users.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Who to contact for any HP away program?
A: Steve Campbell runs the RBP programs. Start with him.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: ZFS & Oracle Performance I am an Oracle DBA, so I'm interested
in whether ZFS will support direct I/O (& file locking), asynchronous
I/O. Also, I am concerned that the copy-on-write method will remove
the benefit of "locality", eg large sequential reads, or small and
rapid writes to redo logs. If this can be tuned by setting large block
sizes, does this mean a 512byte write has to read and write the entire
block? I have read about grouping writes together for performance, but
Oracle dbs wait until the OS tells them that the write is complete,
and user sessions will wait on some writes. Does this mean that the
transaction grouping mechanism will be by-passed?
Mike Shapiro (A): Yes, ZFS will support direct I/O, async I/O,
and certainly file locking. Depending on the underlying block size,
any device will need to do a read-modify-write when the write is less
than the block size. In ZFS, the block sizes are dynamic so we'll try
to select the best sizes based on the workload. Information on exactly
how to best tune and use Oracle with ZFS will be forthcoming as part
of the full release of ZFS. Stay tuned to sun.com/software/solaris/10
for more.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is SunScreen supported with Solaris 10?
Chris Ratcliffe (A): There is no support for SunScreen in Solaris
10. Solaris 10 includes a firewall - based on the open source
ipfilter.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hi everyone. What about clustering? does it come with the OS
or is it still separate?
Mark McClain (A): It is still a separate license. We will
continue to look at distribution and adoption alternatives as the
market continues to evolve.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: From what you've seen so far, on what kind of systems are
containers most used ? 2,4,8, >32 processor-systems ? Is there a
category that dominates others ?
David Comay (A): We've seen containers used on uni-processor
systems as well as large MP systems. The latter definitely allow you
to utilize some of the features in S10 like resource pools in a new,
innovative ways. But even with a single processor machine, customers
are using containers along with the Fair Share Scheduler (see FSS(7D))
to partition the single CPU among the containers on the system.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will ZFS support encryption?
Adam Leventhal (A): It will, but not in its initial release. The
infrastructure already supports encryption, but we have yet to work
out the details of key storage.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Have you picked a license for Open Solaris yet? Will it be GPL
like Linux?
Mark McClain (A): After much due diligence, we have narrowed our
choices to 3 primary options, all of which are already OSI-approved.
At the time we formally unveil the plans for the open source version
of Solaris, we will make the final choice public.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: How will Solaris licensing be affected by dual (and more) core
cpu's when they become available?
Jack O'Brien (A): solaris support subscriptions will be based on
the number of physical CPUs (ie sockets) not number of cores
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Linux vs. Solaris. Compare and contrast. 50pts.
Adam Leventhal (A): First, from a very high level: Solaris has
been around longer. It's not much more depth and breadth. The
perception of Linux is that it's smaller, tighter and faster. Some of
that was true, but in Solaris 10 we've closed the gap in terms of
performance -- both for microbenchmarks and real world tests Solaris
10 is better or close to parity with Linux (for the most part). Now
look at the new big features in Solaris 10: there's _nothing_ in Linux
that comes compares to features like DTrace, Predictive Self-Healing,
ZFS, or many of the new (and old) features of Solaris. Linux is open
source, meaning that anyone in the world can contribute source. When
Solaris goes open source (expect more details in the next few days)
the same will be true. And we intend to uphold the promise of open
source making contributing to Solaris easier and more accessible than
Linux.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: So, After SOlaris 10 is released, there wont be any "Trusted
Solaris" seperately?
Jack O'Brien (A): there will continue to be a trusted solaris
product. what is different is that it is an add on package that
includes the common criteria certifications and is no longer a
separate code base
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What's the big deal behind N1 containers? seems other vendors
are already quite ahead on this...
David Comay (A): The idea of containers is to allow customers to
consolidate the workloads they currently run on separate systems on to
a fewer number of systems. Solaris Containers permits what look like
many Solaris instances to be created where workloads can run in
isolation from one another. As this is implemented via a thin,
lightweight OS layer, there are none of the performance hits that
other solutions can cause when running applications. And since there
is a single OS to manage, overall administration is easier with one
place to manage packages and patches.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: What type of new features does Solaris v.10 offer compared to
the Windows Environment?
Mike Shapiro (A): The major new innovations in Solaris 10 are not
found in Windows, and they aren't found in any other OS in the
industry. A few quick examples: Predictive-Self Healing that can
perform fine-grained restart of software apps and isolate failing
CPUs, I/O components, and memory. DTrace that provides unprecedented
observability into any software stack, including the OS kernel itself.
ZFS, the first 128-bit filesystem with 19-nines of reliability. And
built-in virtualized OS containers, all for a single license, that you
can use to consolidate workloads and isolate users and apps.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will ZFS be released with Solars 10?
Chris Ratcliffe (A): ZFS will be part of a Solaris 10 update. It
will be available for early access in the first half of 2005 and
delivered in the second half of 2005.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will solaris 10 be a push or pull for software distribution
perspective? Is it available now for ordering?
Mark McClain (A): Solaris Express is available now for free
download. At the time of GA, targeted for Jan 2005, the binary will be
available for free RTU. It will be a pull-oriented release.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is Veritas the standard storage management software for
Solaris 10?
Rich Napolitano (A): Enterprise Storage Manager (ESM) is our
standard storage management application. ESM is based on our Lockhart
management infrastrusture and acts as a portal into all of our storage
products and integrates well with other Solaris management tools.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Do you expect any legal challenges to the planned open-source
release of 10?
Mark McClain (A): Part of our due diligence process has been to
validate our ability to opensource effectively 100% of Solaris. While
legal challenges are a fact of life in today's business world, we
don't anticipate any challenges that we are unprepared for.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is Solaris 10 only suitable for Enterprise size businesses
with servers? Does it have any place in smaller offices or the SOHO
market?
Bryan Cantrill (A): Solaris 10 is suitable for any x86, Opteron
or SPARC-based machine! Speaking personally, I run Solaris on my
Opteron (64-bit!) laptop -- and I use features like DTrace, ZFS, and
the service management facility all the time. So it _definitely_ has a
place in smaller offices...
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Will solaris 10 improve the performance of older hardware like
the e4500?
Mike Shapiro (A): Yes, absolutely. There are dozens of
performance improvements that improve performance for apps on existing
h/w, both x86 and SPARC, simply by deploying on Solaris 10. For
example, in Solaris 10 we've dramatically improved the performance of
the TCP/IP stack, the scheduler, and made dozens of
micro-optimizations to system calls, all of which benefit existing
apps on the hardware you already have. Many customers have found at
least a 30% performance improvement just by upgrading an existing box
to Solaris 10.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is Sun working with Dell to get Solaris X86 certified on Dell
Servers?
Chris Ratcliffe (A): Solaris is already certified on a whole host
of Dell servers, see sun.com/bigadmin/hcl for more details...
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Can your new OS run on any platform-say on a laptop? What are
the system requirements?
David Comay (A): Most x86 systems will support Solaris 10
including many laptops. In particular, systems with an AMD Opteron
processor can support S10 in 64-bit mode. S10 includes the Xorg X
server which supports are large number of graphic chipsets.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Dear Mark McClain! May I ask You about implementation of Sun
Ray Server Software under Solaris 10 x86? It will be very attractive
concerning our new activity with Sun Servers on Opterons... ThankYou
in advance. Vladimir Krayushkin, ROY Intl Cons. Inc.
Mark McClain (A): Yes, SunRay server software is supported on
Solaris on x86. We appreciate your support.
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Q: Tentative date for Veritas products availability on Solaris
x86
A: Client version (32-bit) of Foundation Suite and NetBackup is
supported today. 64-bit for Foundation Suite will be supported around
May. NetBackup server edition will be supported around June/July.
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Q: What progress has been made regarding support for SATA RAID
controllers in Solaris 10? Will 3Ware controllers be supported?
Rich Napolitano (A): Today we ship the SE3511 which is an
external SATA RAID controller. Today we do not support the 3Ware
controller. We are considering other internal RAID controller
suppliers.
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Q: When will Solaris 10 be ready as Opteron 64 bit code ?
Adam Leventhal (A): Support for native 64-bit execution on
Opteron and Nocona will be available when Solaris 10 first ships. I've
been running it on my desktop for a few months and the performance
rips.
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Q: That compatibility degree has now with Windows and Mac OS X?
David Comay (A): Since MacOS X is UNIX-based, many applications
can simply be recompiled to run under Solaris (the many pieces of open
source are a testament to that). The SunPC product can be used on
current SPARC workstations to provide Windows compatibility.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: After Sun's switch to Opteron, forcing competition with PC
vendors such as Gateway, and the OS no longer important, the choice is
now which applications to use, why not buy the cheapest opteron
hardware and install XP, RedHat or SuSE?, Isn't price now the key
buying factor, where Sun still doesn't compete?
James Baty (A): The answer of course depends on your business
requirements. Price is certainly important, but so is indemnification
as Scott mentioned (check out the videos on sun.com/nc ), and perhaps
more importantly the security, binary compatibility, and performance
that Solaris 10 delivers, and which Jonathan detailed. And even where
price performance is the key driver, Sun is delivering dramatic
competitive improvements as suggested in the customer references
today.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: what are the hardware requirements for solaris 10?
Adam Leventhal (A): Solaris 10 works on any SPARC system after
UltraSPARC I and most fairly modern x86 systems. Take a look at the
hardware compatability list (HCL)
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sx/, and try throwing Solaris 10
on your old junky x86 box.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Is Solaris goes open source and all can download it?
David Comay (A): Yes, Solaris is definitely going open source and
yes, the source code will be downloadale. Expect to hear soon about
when we will launch Open Solaris.
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Q: what is the key that makes 10 so much better?
Adam Leventhal (A): Solaris 10 is probably the richest release of
Solaris ever. There are new features like DTrace, Zones, ZFS, and
Predictive Self-Healing which will change the way you work --
regardless of whether you're a sysadmin, developer or end-user. There
are also many many quality of life enhancements that make Solaris 10
easier and more powerful than previous releases of Solaris or any
release of Linux. Go try out Solaris 10 -- within fifteen minutes I'm
sure you'll find something that makes it so much better.
http://www.sun.com/solaris/10
______________________________________________________________________
Q: I love the idea of container in Solaris 10. However, doesn't
it mean in the long term, Sun's customers will need less servers from
Sun ? How is Sun going to cope ?
David Comay (A): We expect to grow our business by providing
innovative technologies that can be utilized within a container
environment and that will provide existing and new customers the
functionality needed to run their business in a secure fashion.
______________________________________________________________________
Moderator: For the latest information and to download Solaris 10
now, go to www.sun.com/software/solaris/10
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello Scott. Is the Solaris 10 stable then Solaris 9 And Can I
Run Solaris 10 on X86 Platform at this time? Thanks Best Regards Radek
Nastoupil
Adam Leventhal (A): Yes! We've spent a lot of time talking about
the new features in Solaris 10, but it's also faster and more stable
than previous releases. Solaris is one source base for x86 and SPARC
so the Solaris 10 you can download today has full support for x86; in
fact, much of the development done in the Solaris kernel group is on
our x86 laptops running Solaris 10.
______________________________________________________________________
Q: Hello Scott! Do You Include Solaris 10 Gnome 2.8?
David Comay (A): Solaris 10 includes GNOME 2.6
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