Sun backs PostgreSQL
Launches OpenSolaris file system as well.
By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service | Published: 06:14, 18 November 2005
Sun Microsystems has announced support for the PostgreSQL database on its Solaris 10 OS and has launched new technologies in OpenSolaris, including a next-generation file system.
The company will distribute and offer 24-by-7 support for PostgreSQL, an open-source relational database, on Solaris 10; PostgreSQL is currently in release 8.1.
Sun also integrated the new Solaris ZFS file system into OpenSolaris, and laid out plans to add Solaris Containers for Linux Applications, a technology that allows companies to run Red Hat Linux binaries unmodified on Solaris 10, by the end of the year.
The new ZFS Solaris file system is not merely an incremental improvement over the OS's previous file system, but is actually a "fundamentally new approach to data management." ZFS presents a pooled storage model that eliminates the concept of volumes and its associated problems of partitions, provisioning, wasted bandwidth and stranded storage, according to the site.
ZFS allows thousands of file systems to draw from a common storage pool, each one taking up only as much space as it needs, while the combined I/O bandwidth of all the devices in the storage pool is available to all file systems at all times, according to the OpenSolaris Community. The file system also supports self-healing data through error detection and correction, and task automation that simplifies storage management, according to Sun.
Sun plans to make ZFS broadly available to customers in the first half of 2006, according to the company.
