Thursday, 26 October 2006

Solaris 10 to Power Internet Backbone

Sun has announced that the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) has chosen the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), and Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers, powered by AMD Opteron processors, as an F-root server, one of the 13 root DNS servers that are the foundation of the Internet.

According to the company, the Solaris 10 OS includes over 600 new features for x86 and x64 systems. Using Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), customers have reported applications running 30 times faster on the Solaris 10 OS. With Solaris Predictive Self-Healing, applications and services hosted on the Solaris OS for x64 continue to run even in the presence of CPU, Memory and Disk failures.

"Virtually every Internet transaction - from sending an e-mail to finding a web site begins with a DNS query. The performance bar is set extremely high for a root DNS server platform," said Joao Damas, F-root Programme Manager, ISC. "The Internet would essentially stop functioning if a majority of the 13 root servers were disrupted for any reason, consequently a root DNS server is an obvious target for hackers. Thus our security requirements are among the most stringent anywhere, which is one of the key reasons we selected the combination of Solaris 10 and a Sun Fire x64 server."