Oracle Beefs Up Solaris with New Features

Oracle has updated the Solaris operating system the company gained in its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, delivering a new version of the core OS and more.

Oracle has updated the Solaris operating system the company gained in its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, delivering a new version of the core operating system, an update to the Solaris clustering software, and a set of tools and compilers for developing applications on the new Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 system.

The company announced Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 and Oracle Solaris Studio12.2 on Sept. 8.

Oracle said in a news release:

"Oracle Solaris is now developed, tested and supported as an integrated component of Oracle's "applications-to-disk" technology stack, which includes continuous major platform testing, in addition to the Oracle Certification Environment, representing over 50,000 test use cases for every Oracle Solaris patch and platform released.

Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 provides networking and performance enhancements, virtualization capabilities, updates to Oracle Solaris ZFS and advancements to leverage systems based on the latest SPARC and x86 processors.

The Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 update includes new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install manner, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications."

"Oracle Solaris provides the proven, enterprise-class reliability, security and performance customers need for their most mission-critical and essential applications-customers tell us: if it must work, it runs on Oracle Solaris," John Fowler, executive vice president of Systems at Oracle, said in a statement. "Oracle Solaris 10 set the standard for mission-critical computing. Now, through Oracle's increased investment in technical innovation and integration with the entire Oracle hardware and software stack, we can achieve even higher levels of application performance and service levels."

Moreover, the news release said, "Oracle Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multicore/processor/thread systems and enable industry-leading performance, security and scalability for both existing and new systems."

The company also said:

"Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 features include:

-   Networking and database optimizations for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC).

-   Oracle Solaris Containers now provide enhanced "P2V" (Physical to Virtual) capabilities to allow customers to seamlessly move from existing Oracle Solaris 10 physical systems to virtual containers quickly and easily.

-   Increased reliability for virtualized Solaris instances when deployed using Oracle VM for SPARC, also known as Logical Domains.

-   Oracle Solaris ZFS online device management, which allows customers to make changes to file system configurations, without taking data offline.

-   New Oracle Solaris ZFS tools to aid in recovering from problems related to unplanned system downtime."

Oracle also said, "Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 builds on Oracle Solaris to offer the most extensive, enterprise high availability and disaster recovery solutions. [The solution] enables virtual application clusters via Oracle Solaris Containers in Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition and integrates with Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle's Siebel CRM, MySQL Cluster and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g for consolidation in virtualized environments ... provides the highest level of security with Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions for mission-critical applications and services... [and] supports InfiniBand on public networks and as storage connectivity and is tightly integrated and thoroughly tested with Oracle's Sun Server and Storage Systems."

For its part, "Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 provides an advanced suite of tools designed to work together for the development of single, multithreaded and distributed applications. With its integrated development environment (IDE), including a code-aware editor, workflow and project functionality, Oracle Solaris Studio helps increase developer productivity," the company said.

Elsewhere on its site, the company added, "Oracle Solaris Studio provides the highest-performance C, C++ and FORTRAN compilers for the Solaris operating system, along with advanced multicore tools for parallel thread performance analysis, debugging and performance libraries for SPARC and x86-based systems."