SANTA CLARA, Calif., Jan. 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. , the creator of Solaris(TM), today announced a series of updates to the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) -- Solaris 10 11/06 -- that enhance efficiency, safety and reliability, providing unparalleled benefits for data management and business continuity.

"Solaris 10 runs on over 700 systems, including servers from Dell's PowerEdge, IBM's BladeCenter, Hewlett-Packard's Proliant, and Fujitsu Siemens' PRIMERGY product lines. It is the only operating system proven to scale from widely available x86 servers to massively scalable SPARC-based servers," said Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris Marketing for Sun Microsystems. "Today is the latest in a series of blockbuster new feature announcements that have included virtualization, security, clustering, and performance enhancements -- making the Solaris 10 OS ideal for building secure, scalable and affordable Web-based applications and services."

New security features include Solaris(TM) Trusted Extensions which protects sensitive data and applications using labeled security technology, previously only available to highly specialized operating systems or appliances. This enables customers to quickly add new applications or users without performing extensive analysis or writing complex security policies -- while maintaining iron-clad security. Also new is Secure By Default Networking, which automatically configures a customer's system to be impervious to network attacks by disabling many unused services, reducing the network exposure, while leaving the system fully functional for typical use.

Solaris 10 11/06 is currently in process for Common Criteria Certification at EAL4+ with Controlled Access, Role-Based Access Control, and Labeled Security Protection Profiles (CAPP, RBAC, LSPP) for SPARC(R) and x64/x86 servers. Sun is also proud to announce that Solaris 10 3/05 was awarded Common Criteria Certification at the highest levels for an OS, helping to assure customers that their mission-critical systems are running on a well protected, trustworthy platform. More information is available on Solaris 10 security certifications at: http://www.sun.com/software/security/securitycert/#sol10 .

Virtualization improvements include Logical Domains and enhanced Solaris(TM) Containers. Using Logical Domains customers can now dynamically provision and run up to 32 OS instances on each UltraSPARC(R) T1-based system. Running inside the Logical Domain instances, Solaris Containers allow the isolation of software applications and services, enabling the creation of many private execution environments within a single instance of Solaris. Customers can detach, clone and move containers for greater utilization of system resources, simplified testing and deployment and improved application security.

To expand support for Solaris Containers, the company also announced last week improvements to Solaris(TM) Cluster, Sun's business continuity and disaster recovery platform for the Solaris 10 OS. Sun will continue to add breakthrough virtualization technology to Solaris 10 through 2007 -- most notably with the planned addition of the open source Xen hypervisor, a paravirtualization technology that presents a software interface to virtual machines. The Xen hypervisor is available today from the OpenSolaris(TM) Xen community project at: http://opensolaris.org/os/community/xen/.

The Solaris 10 OS holds 125 performance world records and Sun continues to introduce new features to enhance the high performance OS. The new network Layer 7 Cache-implements an HTTP cache in the Solaris kernel -- to speed up the response time for Web servers, allowing them to handle more concurrent clients and serve them quicker.

For more information or to download Solaris visit: http://www.sun.com/solaris. For more details about Solaris 10 features, see: http://www.sun.com/solaris/features .

About Sun Microsystems, Inc.

A singular vision -- "The Network Is The Computer"(TM) -- guides Sun in the development of technologies that power the world's most important markets. Sun's philosophy of sharing innovation and building communities is at the forefront of the next wave of computing: the Participation Age. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at sun.com.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Katie Neuman Bite Communications (415) 365-0470 katie.neuman@bitepr.com Bob Wientzen Sun Microsystems (303) 661-4993 bob.wientzen@sun.comallpress@sun.com (650) 786-7737

NOTE: Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solaris, OpenSolaris, CoolThreads, and The Network Is The Computer are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks or registered trademarks of SPARC International, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Products bearing the SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

CONTACT: Katie Neuman of Bite Communications, +1-415-365-0470, or
katie.neuman@bitepr.com, for Sun; or Bob Wientzen of Sun Microsystems,
+1-303-661-4993, or bob.wientzen@sun.com

Web site: http://sun.com/