Fujitsu: Run Solaris 10 & 11 Natively on New Bare Metal

[Fujitsu Logo, courtesy Fujitsu Ltd.]

Fujitsu: Run Solaris 10 & 11 Natively on New Bare Metal

Abstract:

Sun Microsystems originally designed the SPARC processor and merged AT&T and BSD UNIX together to form Solaris. Fujitsu tarted developing clone hardware, which provided a second manufacturing source, fufilling military applications requirements. Oracle purchased Sun and later ended the native support of Solaris 10 on newer SPARC platforms. Fujitsu continues to support Solaris 10 & 11 on native Fujitsu SPARC M12 Platform.

[Fujitsu SPARC64

The M12

In 2017, Fujitsu released the SPARC64 XII processor, reaching the fastest performance in the industry, of all processors in the market.  This processor was placed in a chassis named the M12. Unlike the newer Oracle chassis, these platforms can run native Solaris 10 or 11, without virtualization.

This chassis comes in 2 flavors: M12-2 and M12-2S. The M12-2S is perhaps, the most interesting: the 2S can scale be adding up to a total of 12 chassis in a system to provide 32 sockets and support over 3000 threads by merely adding one chassis at a time!

[Solaris Logo, courtesy of Sun Microsystems, now Oracle]

Solaris 10

It should be noted, Solaris 10 does have a definitive life expectancy. New features are not expected, as the OS is now in Extended Support. Extended support offered Solaris 10 Patch Clusters. April 17 in 2018 marked the first set of Extended Support Patches, in Classic Solaris. As of this publishing, Oracle released another set of Solaris 10 Patches in January 9, 2019. The details for most current Recommended Solaris 10 Patch Set can be found by following the link. The final set of Extended patches will be released in January 2021. There is an uplift for Solaris 10 Extended Support, while Solaris 11 is a free update... and this is preferable!

Conclusions:

While bare metal may be appealing to some applications, such as dedicated clustered solutions where redundancy is built at the application layer, most engineers prefer the portability of LDoms on a chassis cluster, where LDoms can be live migrated onto another chassis as planned maintenance is conducted on the drained chassis. The Solaris 10 bare metal support offered by Fujitsu provides large scale users, who desire bare metal performance the least amount of complexity, an option offered by no other SPARC vendor.