That commitment resulted in features tailored for Intel's new Nehalem CPUs such as a "power-aware dispatcher" that enables Solaris to aggregate workloads onto the fewest number of CPU cores needed and then turn off the rest, he said.

Solaris now can also offload network traffic processing from the CPU onto compliant network cards.

Sun released , the same time it announced a plan to gradually make the OS fully open-source.

Its last major update to Solaris , when it introduced its 128-bit ZFS file system and its Containers lightweight virtualization technology, and also bundled the PostGres open-source database.

Both ZFS and Containers were also updated with this release. ZFS now has a high-speed cloning feature that lets a new server point to existing data rather than copy and write a second, unnecessary time. That can speed up the creation of virtual machines under Containers, Wake said.