9 November, 2011
By Mark Cox
Oracle has announced availability of Oracle Solaris 11, the first fully virtualized OS, which it is terming the first Cloud OS. Oracle Solaris 11 is designed to meet the security, performance and scalability requirements of cloud-based deployments allowing customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications in private, hybrid, or public clouds.
Oracle Solaris 11 provides comprehensive, built-in virtualization capabilities for OS, network and storage resources. In addition to its built-in virtualization capabilities, Oracle Solaris 11 is engineered for Oracle VM server virtualization on both x86 and SPARC based systems, providing deployment flexibility and secure live migration.
“Oracle Solaris 11 is the most significant operating system release of the past decade,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. “With built-in server, storage and now, network virtualization, Oracle Solaris 11 delivers the industry’s first cloud OS. Customers can simplify their enterprise deployments, drive up utilization of their data center assets, and run Oracle and other enterprise applications faster all within a secure, scalable cloud or traditional enterprise environment.”
Oracle Solaris Zones virtualization scales up to hundreds of zones per physical node at a 15x lower overhead than VMware and without artificial limits on memory, network, CPU and storage resources. New, integrated network virtualization allows customers to create high-performance, low-cost data center topologies within a single OS instance for ultimate flexibility, bandwidth control and observability.
Oracle Solaris 11 runs business-critical enterprise applications in virtualized massive horizontal scale as well as vertically integrated environments on a wide range of SPARC and x86 servers. Customers can run any of the more than 11,000 applications supported today on Oracle Solaris 11, with guaranteed binary compatibility through the Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee Program. Customers can also preserve their existing investments by using P2V and V2V tools to move their existing Oracle Solaris 10 environments to an Oracle Solaris 10 Zone, while gaining access to the latest Oracle Solaris 11 enhancements.
“With Oracle Solaris, we have a unique opportunity to support the industry’s largest and leading business software portfolio on the industry’s best UNIX for both SPARC and x86 servers,” said Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of Oracle Product Development. “Working together, our development teams engineer, test and support advanced solutions to our customers’ toughest problems. We are pleased to announce that our key software products–Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and Oracle Applications–are available and optimized for Oracle Solaris 11 on SPARC and x86 systems.”
Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center, now included in systems support, provides converged systems management, enabling enterprise wide, centralized control over hardware, OS and virtualization resources.
Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center and Oracle VM software are included as part of systems support with all of Oracle’s Sun servers, providing customers with built-in cloud capabilities.
Partners in Oracle Partner Network (OPN) will find new Oracle Solaris 11 tools and resources in the Oracle Solaris Knowledge Zone including the Oracle Solaris Remote Lab and the Oracle Solaris Development Initiative. New Oracle Solaris 11 Training is also available to help customers and partners take advantage of the best-in-class features of Oracle Solaris 11 and upgrade from Oracle Solaris 10 or earlier versions.
