Students start Solaris Systems research


  • April 03, 2007

Students from the College of Information Technology (OCIT) are experimenting with Sun servers and the Solaris operating system.  In a world where productivity is quantified by the balance of speed and reliability, research is an important driving force to discover the most optimal components in development.  These tests will allow the students to compare the efficiency of Sun/Solaris servers versus Linux servers to these ends.

The exercises are helping OCIT students learn important research and development skills by means of a step-by-step program of study.  The first phase involves quantifying the criteria of a valid comparison. In the simplest case, servers are compared by software performance, seeing that hardware components are nearly identical.  Among the criteria for comparison are installation and software update time, time delay of website load, and runtime of complex algorithms.

"We have realized how difficult it is to run benchmark analysis with computational technologies," stated Moonsoo, a student of OCIT.  "This is good experience to find out how each component or a group of components of a server can affect the performance."

OCIT students are also probing areas of network infrastructure in order to find out how routers and switches put in series or tree structures can affect network LAN performance.