Oracle president Mark Hurd and Oracle executive vice president John Fowler recently introduced Oracle Solaris 11.2, a complete, integrated and open platform engineered for large-scale enterprise cloud environments. Discussing the released during a live event in New York City, Fowler said that Solaris is a “huge release” with 500 or more projects and enhancements, plus a number of major innovations, and represents an evolution beyond an operating system to a complete platform.
Among the key developments, Oracle Solaris 11.2, incorporates a complete OpenStack distribution; offers an integrated hypervisor on both SPARC and x86 for zero-overhead-virtualization; introduces application-driven Software Defined Networking that integrates with Oracle Java, Oracle Database and Oracle Applications in order to deliver application-level quality of service; provides investment protection with binary compatibility allowing customers to run their existing apps; and enables customers to upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11.2 quickly to take advantage of the new cloud capabilities.
Cloud and Engineered Systems, Two Approaches that Increase Efficiency
According to Hurd, the phenomena of cloud and engineered systems are driven by the same requirement, which is the need to transfer work from the IT budget to the R&D budget to make things work more efficiently. “Who really wants to glue an operating system to a server?" he asked.
Hurd said that the release of Solaris 11.2 fits into the broader picture for Oracle of developing best of breed solutions and systems at each level of the stack, vertically integrated, to drive the cloud, drive through industries, while supported with security, scalability, price/performance.
Confluence of Trends and Requirements Driving Innovation
A confluence of trends and changing requirements are affecting IT, said Hurd who cited three big-picture issues - globalization, the explosion of data, and the rise of mobility. On top of that, Hurd said that there is a whole new wave of employees and customers coming online, and while Millennials may represent only 12% or 13% of GDP right now, they will move to being half of GDP in 8 years. Millennials have no tolerance for lack of speed or poor service and they want instant gratification to any question they have got, about any subject, as fast as they can get it, and their rise will have an impact. “It is going to change how you deal with employees and it is going to change how you deal with customers,” Hurd noted.
Exacerbating these issues is the fact that in this country the average age of an application is 20 years old, written before internet, social media, and mobile came to the fore. The cost of maintaining and modernizing these apps is significant, but with IT budgets edging up by just a few points at best, Hurd observed, and companies will have to be very clever about saving money and innovating simultaneously. Who succeeds is going to be about who can innovate fastest while knowing that they are not going to have a lot more dollars to spend, he said.
More information about the Oracle Solaris 11.2 beta is available from the Oracle Technology Network (OTN).