Solaris 11 Touted as 'First and Only Fully Virtualized' OS
A full month ahead of its planned formal release, Solaris 11 was previewed this week at the Oracle OpenWorld 2011 event in San Francisco. The company demonstrated the forthcoming update for attendees at 50 hands-on labs and technical sessions and revealed several details about the new OS, which, though unreleased formally, is actually up and running in production environments at more than 600 organizations, according to Oracle.
Solaris is the OS at the heart of Oracle's Sun ZFS Storage Appliance, in use by some 3,000 enterprises, and powers the SPARC T4 server line, SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, Exadata Database Machine X2-2 and X2-8 systems, and Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
At the OpenWorld event, the company described Solaris 11 as the "first and only fully virtualized operating system, providing secure, flexible, built-in virtualization services that allow customers to maximize system, network and data resources in their datacenters with zero virtualization overhead."
"Oracle Solaris 11 was engineered to solve the most challenging issues customers face when deploying and managing a modern data center infrastructure. Oracle has accelerated development of Oracle Solaris technologies and with Oracle Solaris 11, we will introduce our most innovative product release to date with features that will help customers move toward agile, efficient and secure business clouds," said John Fowler, executive vice president, systems, Oracle, in a statement released this week. "We are excited to preview Oracle Solaris 11 at Oracle OpenWorld and demonstrate how Oracle Solaris 11 solves customer problems that no other operating system has been able to address."
Among the new features of Solaris 11 are:
- Integrated services for storage, data management, and security;
- New provisioning and maintenance tools designed for data centers and large enterprises;
- Improved performance for Java applications, Oracle Database 11g, and Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g;
- Scalability for "future hardware that will scale to tens of thousands of hardware threads, hundreds of terabytes of system memory and hundreds of gigabits per second of I/O"; and
- Enhanced basic security features.
According to Oracle, a Solaris 11 feature-complete preview is available on the Oracle Solaris Knowledge Zone to gold-level (and higher) members of the Oracle Partner Network. Additional details can be found on the Solaris 11 portlet.