Oracle outlines Solaris and server strategies

Oracle has been explaining its strategy on hardware and software

Oracle has outlined its roadmap for the future development of Solaris and the company's server systems.

Solaris 11 will be released next year, and Oracle will concentrate on building fully integrated servers and applications for big iron systems.

"Complete, open and integrated has been Oracle's mantra for years," said John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle. "The Sun acquisition is about extending that."

Solaris 11 will represent the first major change in the operating system for six years. The new code will include better support for virtualisation, scaling and the management of disparate systems, according to Fowler.

Updates to Solaris 11 will be issued every year until 2014, and Oracle will continue to support Solaris 10 users until they migrate.

On the server side, Oracle will build a range of hardware optimised to run applications faster.

Oracle servers will see a 40 times increase in application processing speed by 2015, with four times the number of cores and 16 times the memory capacity to 64TB, the firm said.

However, analysts have pointed out that Oracle's definition of an open system is questionable, and that chief information officers (CIOs) will have to consider the costs of locking their company into Oracle's hardware and software.

"Oracle is reinventing the IBM world of the 1980s," Rob Enderle, principle analyst at the Enderle Group, told V3.co.uk.

"If you buy into Oracle's platform it owns your soul. The lock-in problem is going to have CIOs scratching their heads."

While there are undoubted benefits in choosing Oracle as a single supplier, Enderle warned that the costs are unspecified and need to be considered in the long term.

Oracle is also seeing new life in the tape storage sector. Tape is particularly useful, since it is a cheap and reliable storage medium for the long term that allows companies to store vast amounts of data without breaking the bank.

"Today we have customers looking for exabyte scale archives," said Fowler. " You'd be surprised how many customers are interested in systems of that scale using this technology."