A+Edition for Solaris Technical Overview What is Solaris? Who is Amdahl? What is the A+Edition for Solaris?This technical overview will describe the major components of and the philosophy behind Amdahl's A+Edition for Solaris Enterprise Server. This product combines the expertise that Amdahl has developed over 13 years of providing UTS, a commercial grade UNIX operating system on Amdahl 370/390 class mainframes, with Solaris from Sunsoft, the industry leading UNIX operating system.
Solaris is the leading operating environment for distributed enterprise computing. It offers the power of an industry-leading multitasking, multiprocessing, multithreaded UNIX operating system and fully integrated, standard networking to provide the most powerful open computing environment ever developed.
Solaris features SunOS, Open Network Computing (ONC+) networking, OpenWindows windowing system, and DeskSet productivity tools. These tools and services support a broad range of applications across the SPARC hardware product family, enable the management of heterogeneous environments, and provide the foundation for Sun's superior development and deployment environment.
Amdahl has traditionally been a developer of UNIX for 370/390 class mainframes. Its UTS operating system continues to set the standard for large commercial systems UNIX. UTS provides the capability of simultaneously supporting many thousands of users on a high performance, highly-available, and secure system.
The UTS 4.x system developed by Amdahl is based upon UNIX System V, Release 4, the industry's leading standard for an open, scalable operating system environment. Upon this base, Amdahl engineers built an extensive array of enhancements in the areas of large system performance, high availability, enhanced security and system connectivity.
In September 1993, Amdahl and Sun Microsystems announced a comprehensive set of agreements covering operating systems software, servers and customer service targeted at the enterprise computing marketplace from desktop to data center. The A+Edition for Solaris Enterprise Server is the result of this alliance.
Amdahl's A+Edition for Solaris combines the flexibility of the industry standard set of UNIX interfaces provided by Solaris with a series of enhancements which provide a high performance, stable and secure commercial UNIX operating system. Currently, two releases of the A+Edition are available. Release 1.0 is based upon Solaris 2.3. Release 1.1 is based upon Solaris 2.4. Subsequent sections deal will detail the Solaris enhancements contained within these two releases.
