While still waiting to join Oracle's empire, Sun Microsystems has introduced an updated version of its Solaris operating system. Dubbed Solaris 10 10/09, the new release comes with support for the latest SPARC, Intel, and AMD processors, and includes performance and power efficiency enhancements, a more streamlined management of system installations, lots of fixes and Solaris ZFS updates, including the ability to use solid state drives for data caching and high volume transactional applications.

"Sun continues to add significant capabilities to the Solaris OS, delivering sophisticated power management and performance for the datacenter and helping our customers protect their business continuity," said Jim McHugh, vice president, Datacenter Marketing, Sun Microsystems. "With Solaris 10 10/09, installation, update and patch features have been enhanced to simplify system administration and reduce cost. In addition, Solaris ZFS has been updated to integrate Flash technology, the next revolution in storage hardware, into the operating system."

To try out Solaris 10 10/09 see this page for a download, while for more info on the updates brought by this version click on this link.