Enhancements include features that boost performance and lower energy consumption for servers powered by Intel Corp.'s new Nehalem-class Xeon processors, and improvements to virtualization and storage.

The next major release of Solaris, version 11, is scheduled for the middle of next year, says Larry Wake, group manager for Solaris marketing at Sun. He declined to speculate on the fate of Solaris after the Oracle acquisition.

After buying Sun earlier this month, "by far the best Unix technology available in the market" and the "heart of the business" for Sun.

Sun released Solaris in 1992 as a successor to its earlier SunOS. The then-proprietary operating system was historically tightly integrated with Sun's Sparc CPUs, though that has changed.

"We want to make sure Solaris runs well on the boxes we make, but also make sure it works on everybody else's systems," Wake said.