Solaris upgrade supports larger storage

Sun Microsystems has updated its Solaris operating system to support larger storage systems, among other improvements, the vendor said Tuesday.

Solaris 9 4/03, for systems using Sun's SPARC processors and x86 processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is Sun's first update for Solaris 9 this year, an upgrade from version 9 12/02 released in December last year.

Updating will allow users to have as much as 2 petabytes, or 2 million gigabytes, of storage in a single volume, as opposed to the 1-terabyte limit on storage imposed by the Solaris Volume Manager in the older versions of Solaris, Bill Moffitt, group manager for Solaris product management at Sun, said.

Breaking the 1-terabyte limit is a significant step after the introduction of the Solaris Volume Manager in May 2002 and the unveiling of an improved Unix file system in Solaris in December last year, according to Moffitt.

The Solaris update includes several dozen changes including support for several regional languages used in India and support for inputting Chinese characters, Sun said.

Coming in June is version 3.5 of the Sun Management Center, an application that allows administrators to better manage a large number of machines, Moffitt said.

The upgrade to 9 4/03 is free for current Solaris 9 users and is available on Sun's Web site.