Oracle delivers Oracle Solaris 11 Express, a new version of the Solaris operating system aimed at developers and serving as a preview of Oracle Solaris 11.
Oracle
has delivered Oracle Solaris 11 Express, the latest version of the Solaris
operating system the company bought in its acquisition of Sun Microsystems.
However, the new "Express" release is aimed at developers as a
preview to the full version of Solaris 11, which is yet to come in 2011.
Oracle
officials said the Nov. 15 release of Solaris 11 Express, which delivers
advanced Oracle Solaris features that have been in development for more than
five years, demonstrates the company's commitment and R&D investment in
Oracle Solaris. At
the Oracle OpenWorld 2010 show in September, Oracle announced that it would
provide an Express version of Solaris 11, and the company has delivered on that
promise.
In
a press release on the new technology, Oracle said Oracle Solaris 11 Express
comes in an easy-to-use, production-ready package so customers can get started
using it quickly to deploy new applications.
"We
are excited to announce the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express to enable our
customers to deploy the new advanced features of Solaris 11 across a broad set
of platforms, as well as Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic," said John
Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, in a statement. "Through
the same engineering disciplines that achieved legendary mission-critical
reputation for Oracle Solaris, we are expecting Oracle Solaris 11 to further
reduce any downtime by being quicker and easier to deploy, maintain and update;
and deliver a highly efficient, virtualized operating system to meet the scale
and performance requirements of immediate and future virtualization and
cloud-based deployments."
Indeed,
Oracle officials said new availability features reduce planned downtime by up
to 50 percent, virtually eliminating traditional patching and maintenance-related
reboots and vastly improving system boot time to tens of seconds. In addition,
Oracle Solaris 11 Express adds network virtualization and resource management
to the built-in virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris. And Oracle
Solaris 11 Express will also power the Oracle Exadata X2-2 and X2-8 Database Machines, as well as
the Oracle Exalogic
Elastic Cloud machine.
Meanwhile,
Oracle Solaris 11 Express delivers increased Oracle
Fusion Middleware 11g and Java-based application performance through
jointly engineered improvements, such as memory management and I/O
enhancements.
Other
key new features in Oracle Solaris 11 Express include: networking virtualization and resource management
capabilities that increase throughput, speed up applications, and reduce
network loads and complexity; ZFS enhancements for file and block
deduplication, encryption and provisioning; further reductions in number of
maintenance operations that require a reboot; and Fast Reboot, which allows
customers to recover systems and databases in tens of seconds verses tens of
minutes.
In
addition, the new version of the operating system delivers multitenancy with
enhanced security for the virtual and cloud environments of today, and
implementing the latest security standards.
Other
highlights of Oracle Solaris 11 Express include new patching, upgrade and
installation capabilities designed to reduce risk and greatly simplify the most
common system administrator tasks; maximum performance and scale for future
hardware that will scale to tens of thousands of hardware threads, hundreds of
terabytes of system memory and hundreds of gigabits of I/O; and a built-in
snapshot facility that always keeps a backup of the system boot image and
allows customers to revert back to the old version with a simple reboot, Oracle
said.
Oracle
officials also said Oracle Solaris 11 preserves guaranteed binary compatibility
with more than 11,000 third-party products and customer-developed applications
on more than 1,000 SPARC and x86 systems from Oracle and other hardware
providers. And My Oracle Support telemetry integration with the Oracle Solaris
in-depth fault management architecture allows customers to receive proactive
and pre-emptive support that reduces service outages from known issues.
Moreover,
partners in the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) will be able to find new Oracle
Solaris 11 tools and resources in the Oracle Solaris Knowledge Zone.
On
Tuesday, Dec. 7, Oracle will host a Webcast on Oracle Solaris 11 Express
featuring a live chat with the Oracle Solaris development team. Interested
parties can register for the Webcast here.
Despite
stressing its commitment for Solaris, Oracle has done just the opposite with
OpenSolaris, an open-source distribution of Solaris. Oracle announced earlier
this year that it would discontinue support for OpenSolaris. However, some
members of the OpenSolaris community banded together to fill the void with the Illumos project, which is an effort to
deliver a derivative of OpenSolaris for and by the community.
Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.
Email
Print
