Oracle Outlines Road Map for Solaris 2011, Promises Express Release

SAN FRANCISCO—At Oracle OpenWorld 2010, the database and systems giant assured its base of Solaris customers that the operating system is not going anywhere and shared a road map for Oracle Solaris 11.

Indeed, John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, said Oracle is increasing its investment in the Oracle Solaris operating system and is preparing for the planned availability of Oracle Solaris 11 in 2011 by releasing Solaris 11 Express, to provide customers with access to the latest Solaris 11 technology.

Oracle Solaris 11 is scheduled to contain more than 2,700 projects with more than 400 inventions, and will be the result of more than 20 million person hours of development and over 60 million hours of testing.

Oracle Solaris 11 is expected to increase application throughput, improve platform performance, and maximize overall platform reliability and security through joint engineering and integration testing with the Oracle software stack, Oracle said in a press release.

In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 will virtually eliminate patching and update errors with new dependency-aware packaging tools that are aligned across the entire Oracle hardware and software stack to reduce maintenance overhead.

"Oracle Solaris is the number one enterprise operating system, and customers everywhere know that if their systems must run, they run Solaris," Fowler said in a statement. "Solaris 10 set the bar for operating system reliability, scalability and security, and Oracle Solaris 11 is now raising that bar by increasing system availability, delivering the scale and optimizations to run Oracle and enterprise applications faster with greater security and delivering unmatched efficiency through the completely virtualized operating system."

Oracle Solaris 11 will help reduce maintenance windows by eliminating the need for up to 50 percent of system restarts. It also will recover systems in tens of seconds rather than tens of minutes with Fast Reboot. And users will receive proactive and pre-emptive support that reduces service outages from known issues via My Oracle Support telemetry integration with the Oracle Solaris in-depth fault management architecture.

For its part, Oracle Solaris 11 is being engineered with many new capabilities that are designed to make it ideal for building, deploying and maintaining cloud systems, Fowler said. Oracle Solaris 11 will be optimized for the scale and performance requirements of immediate and future cloud-based deployments, allowing customers to reduce costs and increase security by creating self-contained, multitier application environments in single instance systems linked by virtual networking.

With Oracle Solaris 11, users also can increase Oracle Fusion Middleware 11 g and Java-based application performance through jointly engineered improvements, such as memory management and I/O enhancements. And they can achieve 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.

In addition, Oracle said more than 1,000 SPARC and x86 systems from other hardware systems providers have been tested and certified for running Oracle Solaris.

Meanwhile, the first Oracle Solaris 11 Express release, expected by the end of calendar year 2010, will provide customers with timely access to the latest Oracle Solaris 11 Express features with an optional Oracle support agreement. This release is expected to be the path forward for developers, end users and partners using previous generations of Solaris and OpenSolaris releases.

Solaris 11 will be powering the newly announced Oracle Exadata X2-2 and X2-8 Database Machines, as well as the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine. Customers invested in Oracle Solaris will find these new offerings very attractive to standardize their operating system and simplify their IT operations.