OpenWorld: Oracle previews Solaris 11

Solaris 11 will ship this year on the Oracle X2-8 Database Machine and the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine

SAN FRANCISCO: Oracle has taken the wraps off the next major overhaul of the Solaris operating system at Openworld 2010 in San Francisco.

The next version improves performance, scalability, security, availability and efficiency, according to John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle.

The current version of the OS can support hundreds of threads and a few terabytes of memory, but the new version will scale to thousands of threads and up to hundreds of terabytes of memory, Fowler said. It will also feature built-in virtualisation and security.

Version 11 will include what Oracle referred to as dependency-aware packaging tools, which will be aligned across the entire Oracle hardware and software stack to reduce the patching burden. A Fast Reboot tool will also let firms recover systems in tens of seconds versus tens of minutes.

Oracle has focused on the needs of cloud computing users with the development of Solaris 11, aiming for compatibility with future hardware that will support huge volumes of threads and system memory, as well as hundreds of gigabits of I/O.

On announcing the update, Fowler quipped, “Bigger is better with Larry [Ellison, Oracle chief executive]."

Solaris 11 will be available later this year on the Oracle X2-8 Database Machine and the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine, both unveiled at Openworld, and also as part of Oracle’s storage range this year. It will be released for Sparc and x86 servers next year, Fowler said.

Earlier this month, Oracle announced a series of updates to its Solaris range.

The updates covered Oracle's Solaris 10 9/10 enterprise operating system, its availability and disaster recovery product Solaris Cluster 3.3, and development platform Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2.

The latest version of Solaris 10 has a number of fixes and improvements, including performance enhancements for systems using Oracle RAC and Java Runtime.