Oracle releases Solaris 11

Oracle today released version 11 of Solaris, the first major update of the Unix operating system since it was acquired by Oracle as part of its takeover of Sun Microsystems in 2009.

“This is a milestone for us, it’s been years in development and has solved a number of problems related to deploying next-generation datacentres and cloud compute systems,” said Oracle senior director of product marketing Charlie Boyle.

Boyle said that the release incorporated “massive improvements in scale and performance of the Solaris core features”, adding that Solaris 11 would be optimised to work better with the rest of Oracle's software stack and hardware.

Oracle software development vice president Markus Flierl said Oracle’s various product engineering teams were meeting on a regular basis to make sure they could solve issues around hardware and software integration in cloud environments.

“A big challenge for customers running thousands of physical nodes was provisioning, updating and rebooting these nodes. So a lot of administration was needed there,” said Flierl.

“With firms running virtual nodes on these physical systems the administration effort goes up exponentially,” added Flierl.

Solaris 11 now includes a feature called Boot Environment, which allows administrators to create a boot environment for their systems that is four times faster than that achievable in Red Hat environments, Oracle said.

“This is useful when you’re running tens or hundreds of thousands of virtual machines,” said Flierl.

As well as OS virtualisation, Flierl said Solaris 11 could also virtualise network resources.

The system also benefits from enhanced security; it allows system administrators to lock down infrastructure on which thousands of firms are running applications in a multi-tenanted public cloud environment.

“This means that users can’t maliciously or accidently modify that environment in such a way as to cause damage to the whole infrastructure,” said Flierl.

Oracle has also enhanced Solaris's database memory sharing, and it now provides a better health check and patch management of hardware and software infrastructure.

Flierl said the improvements in Solaris 11 would be cross-platform, and available for Oracle's Sun-developed Sparc hardware and x86 systems.