Solaris 10: a collection of great, new, unique features :: The Jem Report :: The Internet’s Best Computer Review Site
Here are some of the “quality of life features” in Solaris 10:
* Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), a program and framework with an Awk-like command syntax that allows a sysadmin to quickly examine the behavior of the software environment from userland applications down to the most basic level
* ZFS (formerly known as the Zettabyte File System; the term “zettabyte” has nothing to do with this file system, so its official yet meaningless name is now simply ZFS), which was written from the ground up to accommodate modern storage devices and redundancy solutions
* Solaris Fault Management (also called Predictive Self-Healing), which is an integrated framework and analysis system that monitors data for abnormalities, then can isolate the malfunctioning device that is causing the corrupted data and route around it if possible. Since hardware failures are rarely instantaneous, Solaris Fault Management can detect failing hardware before the results become apparent to users.
* Upgraded security: Instead of offering a separate distribution of Solaris for the Trusted Solaris product, Sun has added 80% of the integrated security features of Trusted Solaris to Solaris 10. Trusted Solaris 10 will still be available as a group of add-on packages to the standard Solaris operating environment.
* Vendor-neutral support offerings: This means that, on the high end of its service plans, Sun will support Solaris, all software written for Solaris natively, and all LSB-compliant Linux binaries that users might run on Solaris 10 through the Linux Application Environment (formerly known as Project Janus).
* Process Rights Management: This is a revised and updated permissions structure that allows specific users to have specific root permissions, so if several admins are controlling individual services on the same server, they can be given complete control over their processes and programs without having full root access to the system.