As virtualization news and information continues to spread at a fairly rapid pace, Sun Microsystems has latched onto that wave and is making news of its own.

In today's IT world, organizations are building large-scale information systems in order to solve business problems, and they are constantly seeking new ways to protect their technological investments while still providing scalable and highly available IT infrastructures that are capable of adapting to change. Sun Solaris Containers is one method that is available to help reduce IT infrastructure costs and improve end user service level management.

So what exactly are Solaris Containers? Sun describes Solaris Containers as their next advance in server virtualization.

Solaris Containers provide isolation between software applications or services using flexible, software-defined boundaries. Applications can be managed independently of each other, even while running in the same instance of the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS). Solaris Containers create an execution environment within a single instance of the Solaris OS and provide:

• Full resource containment and control for more predictable service levels
• Software fault isolation to minimize fault propagation and unplanned downtime
• Security isolation to prevent unauthorized access as well as unintentional intrusions