Oracle releases Oracle Solaris 11, first Cloud OS

Oracle today announced availability of Oracle Solaris 11, 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.

As the first fully virtualised operating system (OS), Oracle Solaris 11 provides comprehensive, built-in virtualisation capabilities for OS, network and storage resources:

In addition to its built-in virtualisation capabilities, Oracle Solaris 11 is engineered for Oracle VM server virtualisation on both x86 and SPARC-based systems, providing deployment flexibility and secure live migration.

Oracle Solaris Zones virtualisation 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 virtualisation allows customers to create high-performance, low-cost data centre topologies within a single OS instance for ultimate flexibility, bandwidth control and 'observability'.

Oracle Solaris 11 offers comprehensive management across the entire infrastructure - operating system, physical hardware, networking and storage - as well as the virtualisation layer.

New connected cloud management ensures that customers always have the latest Solaris updates from Oracle and proactive services help customers achieve maximum uptime.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Centre, now included in systems support, provides converged systems management, enabling enterprise wide, centralised control over hardware, OS and virtualisation resources.

Oracle Solaris ZFS provides the data and storage management foundation for Oracle Solaris 11, delivering ultimate data integrity, flash-enabled tiered storage pools, line speed encryption and the scalability to store and manage unlimited amounts of data.

With Oracle Solaris ZFS, deduplication customers can reduce their storage requirements in virtualised environments by 10x.

Oracle Solaris 11 delivers "secure by default" features, including start-up, role-based root access and low impact auditing for both cloud and traditional data centre deployments.

The built-in encryption acceleration in Oracle Solaris 11 provides a 4x performance boost compared to IBM AIX encryption.

Oracle Solaris and Oracle software applications are designed together, tested together, can be deployed together and supported together to provide faster fail-over, improved reliability and up to 10x better application performance.

Oracle Solaris development teams have worked on co-engineering efforts to increase Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and Java-based application performance, availability, security and manageability on Oracle Solaris.

New Oracle Solaris 11 enhancements include optimised shared memory management, I/O improvements, integrated resource management and crypto off-load.

Oracle Solaris 11 is the ideal platform to run 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 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.

Oracle Solaris delivers performance that matters to customers:

Today, Oracle Solaris 11 delivered a new world record result on SPECjvm2008, a general-purpose, multi-threaded Java benchmark. In combination with Oracle's SPARC T4-2 server and the Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, Oracle Solaris 11 delivers up to 41% improvement over the previous result using Oracle Solaris 10(1).

Oracle Solaris has already achieved world record benchmarks that span a wide range of enterprise applications, including 10 world records posted most recently on Oracle's SPARC T4 servers.

The latest release of Oracle Solaris is engineered to provide cloud-scale life cycle management with secure, fail-safe boot environments, safe roll-backs, 4x faster upgrades and 2.5x faster system re-boots, and is leveraging the power of Oracle Solaris ZFS.

Oracle Solaris 11 is already in production at over 700 top companies around the world and deployed on thousands of Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliances, as well as the Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and X2-8 and the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud engineered systems.

Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Centre 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.

Oracle Solaris 11 is certified on SPARC and X86-based platforms as conforming to the UNIX 03 product standard, effective 8 November 2011, per The Open Group. Details at: http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/.

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. Quotes from OPN Partners appear in the Oracle Solaris 11 Quote Sheet below.

New Oracle Solaris 11 Training is 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.

Supporting quotes:

"Oracle Solaris 11 is the most significant operating system release of the past decade. With built-in server, storage and now, network virtualisation, Oracle Solaris 11 delivers the industry's first cloud OS. Customers can simplify their enterprise deployments, drive up utilisation of their data centre assets, and run Oracle and other enterprise applications faster all within a secure, scalable cloud or traditional enterprise environment," said John Fowler, executive vice-president, Systems, Oracle.

"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 optimised for Oracle Solaris 11 on SPARC and x86 systems."

Supporting resources:
Oracle Solaris
Oracle Solaris on OTN
Oracle Solaris 11 Training
Oracle's Sun Server and Storage Systems
Oracle Solaris Blog
Connect with Oracle Solaris via Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

(1)SPEC and SPECjvm are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org and this report as of 11/9/2011. SPARC T4-2 454.25 SPECjvm2008 Peak ops/m submitted for review, SPARC T3-2 320.52 SPECjvm2008 Peak ops/m, Sun Blade X6270 317.13 SPECjvm2008 Base ops/m.