Sun Microsystems Inc. and the Internet Systems Consortium Inc. (ISC) the leading provider of public infrastructure for the global Domain Name System (DNS), announced that the ISC chose the free and open source Solaris 10 Operating System (OS)(www.sun.com/ solaris/) and Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers(www.sun.com/ servers/), powered by AMD Opteron processors, as an F-root server, one of the 13 root DNS servers that are the foundation of the Internet.

Typically responding to tens of thousands of DNS requests per second, a root DNS server solution must be highly scalable and fault-tolerant. Sun has tuned and optimized Solaris 10 OS to deliver exceptional performance and mainframe-class reliability on the x64 platform.

The Solaris 10 OS includes more than 600 new and innovative features for x86 and x64 systems, including many that are not available with any other operating system. Using Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), an award winning innovation in the Solaris 10 OS, customers have reported applications running 30 times faster on the Solaris 10 OS. With Solaris Predictive Self-Healing, applications and services hosted on the Solaris OS for x64 continue to run even in the presence of CPU, Memory and Disk failures.

"Virtually every Internet transaction - from sending an email to finding a website - begins with a DNS query," Joao Damas, F-root Programme Manager at ISC said. "The performance bar is set extremely high for a root DNS server platform..

"The Internet would essentially stop functioning if a majority of the 13 root servers were disrupted for any reason, consequently a root DNS server is an obvious target for hackers. Thus our security requirements are among the most stringent anywhere, which is one of the key reasons we selected the combination of Solaris 10 and a Sun Fire x64 server."
Tom Goguen, vice president of Solaris Software for Sun, said running the Solaris 10 OS is the single best way to optimize your investment in an x64 server. "Being a root DNS server, at the heart of the Internet, is a superb example of the mission critical, high-throughput service for which Solaris 10 is designed."

Today, Sun Solaris OS servers claim more than half of worldwide UNIX server unit shipments. Solaris 10 is fully supported on more than 700 x64/x86-based systems from top manufacturers including Sun, Dell, HP and IBM. ENS