Ace's Hardware has an
article on the upcoming features of Solaris 10. With some luck, in a year or two Apple will be in a position where these types of advanced core features can be brought into OS X (both client and Server).
As some examples:
TOE (TCP Offload Engines): TCP/IP processing, for instance, could possibly [???] be sent to the PPC SIMD units, and IBM has stated that future iterations of the POWER line will have TCP/IP (and other) dedicated circuitry.
Solaris Zones: Since these were inspired by, and are functionally similar to FreeBSD's 'jails', OS X presumably already has the right pedigree to implement this type of functionality without a lot of difficulty. Make jails easier to set up and administer, and you've got a winner.
ZFS: OS X's file system (HFS+) is pretty poor by today's standards -- slow, fragile, lacking features like snapshots, etc. There's no need to license Sun's ZFS specifically (or to use SGI's XFS, etc.), but OS X desperately needs a new file system.
Strong security / removal of root: Again, we can turn to the FreeBSD/TrustedBSD "fine-grained capabilites", Manadatory Access Controls, etc.
It's good to see that Sun is making some significant advances in core technologies and not just "chasing Redmond". Here's hoping Apple can keep up.
[None of this is meant to imply that Apple isn't far ahead of Sun and others in a lot of areas too, but some of the infrastructure of OS X still isn't exactly "state of the art".]
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