Oracle commits to Solaris with 11 Express rollout

Oracle has released Solaris 11 Express, and reiterated its commitment to the enterprise operating system.

The updated Solaris includes some features that were five years in the making, and can contribute to reductions in downtime, patch management and reboots, the firm said.

It is also easier to use, according to Oracle, and will let companies begin deploying new applications immediately.

"Through the same engineering disciplines that achieved legendary mission-critical reputation for Solaris, we are expecting Solaris 11 to further reduce any downtime by being quicker and easier to deploy, maintain and update, " said John Fowler, executive vice president for systems at Oracle.

"It will deliver a highly efficient, virtualised operating system to meet the scale and performance requirements of immediate and future virtualisation and cloud-based deployments."

New features include resource management tools to increase throughput, reduce network loads and remove complexity, and the ability to improve the performance of Fusion Middleware 11g as well as Java-based applications, the firm said.

Oracle claims to have reduced the number of maintenance operations that require a reboot, while a Fast Reboot feature should recover systems and databases in seconds rather than minutes. Deduplication, memory management, encryption and provisioning have also been enhanced, Oracle said.

Refreshed patching, upgrade and installation capabilities should simplify the most common system administration tasks, according to Oracle, while a built-in tracking snapshot tool retains a system boot image at all times, enabling simple rollbacks and reboots.