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.