Oracle has announced general availability of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1. Solaris 11.1 represents substantial engineering work and has a focus on several key areas, Charlie Boyle, senior director of Solaris product marketing, tells 5 Minute Briefing. Oracle Solaris 11 is the first operating system built for cloud, he notes. “We have taken lessons learned from our customers and feature requests and built those into Solaris 11.1 to enhance our cloud platform.”
Solaris 11 has also had the fastest uptake of any Solaris release and is already widely in production with thousands of customers with mission-critical deployments across industries such as financial services, retail, manufacturing all running Solaris 11 in production, Boyle says. “Solaris 11.1 is a great platform for customers to embrace and adopt as a standard because not only is it fully supporting all the applications that we have had out there and all the customer workloads, but it is also supporting our future looking hardware roadmap with all the new systems we have on the roadmap for the coming years so for customer looking to standardize on a single platform release, 11.1 is a great release for them to get on.”
Solaris 11.1 Highlights
Oracle Solaris 11.1 increases the performance, availability and I/O throughput of the latest Oracle Database technology. It features a new, optimized shared memory interface between the Oracle Database and Oracle Solaris 11.1 for 8x faster database startup and shutdown, as well as online resizing of the Oracle Database System Global Area (SGA); and introduces unique new capabilities for optimizing Oracle Database performance. Oracle Solaris 11.1 also exposes Oracle Solaris DTrace I/O interfaces that allow an Oracle Database administrator to identify I/O outliers and subsequently isolate network or storage bottlenecks; and adds a new Oracle Solaris DTrace plug-in for Oracle Java Mission Control to enable customers to profile Java applications on Oracle Solaris production systems.
Cloud Enhancements
With Solaris 11.1, Oracle continues to make enhancements in the area of cloud, notes Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris Engineering, Core Technology.
New cloud management features add to Oracle Solaris 11’s built-in virtualization capabilities across system, network and storage resources, including expanded support for Software Defined Networks (SDN) with Edge Virtual Bridging enhancements, to maximize network resource utilization and manage bandwidth in cloud environments; and a new built-in memory predictor monitors application memory use and provides optimized memory page sizes and resource location to speed overall application performance.
“We are seeing customers deploying Solaris 11 in order to build private clouds, public clouds, and they are using it to provide infrastructure service, to provide platform as a service, and to deploy software as a service - so there is a lot of momentum on that front,” says Flierl.
Oracle Enterprise ManagerOpsCenter provides comprehensive cloud management capabilities for Oracle Solaris 11, including self-service provisioning of Oracle Solaris 11 Zones. OpsCenter’s integrated systems management delivers enterprise scale cloud performance. Oracle Enterprise ManagerOpsCenter is available to Oracle Solaris customers at no additional cost under the Ops Center Everywhere Program. In addition, the Oracle Solaris Remote Lab now provides a secure cloud environment for OPN members to test and validate their applications with Oracle Solaris 11 in SPARC and x86 virtual environments.
Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 Highlights
Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 extends high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of Oracle Solaris and includes unique virtual cluster features supporting highly efficient application consolidation with best-in-class availability.
New Oracle Solaris 10 Zone Clusters allow customers to consolidate mission-critical Oracle Solaris 10 applications on Oracle Solaris 11 cloud environments. There is also expanded disaster recovery operations using Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance services along with Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 to coordinate failover of applications and data to a remote disaster recovery site; and faster application recovery with improved storage failure detection and resource dependencies management. A new labeled security capability in Oracle Solaris Zone Clusters provides military-grade application separation in highly consolidated mission-critical deployments using Oracle Solaris 11 Trusted Extensions.
November 7 Webcast
Oracle will host a webcast on November 7, 2012 at 8 am Pacific time on Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, featuring Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris Engineering, Core Technology and Bill Nesheim, vice president, Oracle Solaris Engineering, Platform Software. Register here.