Solaris 8 Administrator's Guide

Chapter 1.  The Network Is the Computer

Sun’s marketing slogans have long focused around a single, underlying concept: “The network is the computer.” Far from being the typical marketing hype that surrounds all operating system releases, this slogan succinctly describes what Sun—and its flagship operating system SunOS—is all about. Although SunOS is a Unix operating system, it is part of a complete operating environment, known as Solaris. Thus, the core operating system is distinguished from the surrounding environment. If you just want a Unix operating system, SunOS is the most popular, since it takes advantage of current System V standards (even though it was originally built from BSD).

However, if you want a complete operating environment that is specifically designed to support network services, then Solaris provides many different applications and services toward this goal. Indeed, the vision associated with Solaris systems is not of a single host operating alone, but of many hosts working together to provide high-availability, high-performance distributed services. This is not a new vision: Sun engineers have developed the very core of what is considered the standard network in services and protocols, from RPC and NFS at the system level to Java at the development level.

SunOS is always designed, modified, and updated to suit the hardware Sun manufactures, rather than a base to which other hardware vendors try and adapt their hardware. This creates a coherence that is missing ...