On November 9, 2011, Oracle officially announced the availability of Solaris 11, the first Cloud OS. Cloud computing is delivering computing as a service, instead of a product, like hardware. Users can easily share software, resources and information through a utility over a network, like the Internet.
Solaris 11: What are some of the Features?
As the first fully virtualized OS, Solaris 11 has some pretty astounding features. It is designed to meet security, performance and scalability requirements. Customers have the choice to run their company applications in private, hybrid, or public clouds. There is also comprehensive, built-in virtualization abilities across the entire infrastructure as an operating system, physical hardware, networking and storage, and the virtualization layer.
Customers can now find it easier to simplify their enterprise deployments, increase their data center assets, and run Oracle and other applications faster within a secure and scalable cloud. By featuring a new, integrated network virtualization, customers have access to high-performance within a single OS instance. This, in turn, will lend to having ultimate flexibility, bandwidth control, and observability.
According to the Oracle press release, “Oracle Solaris and Oracle software applications are designed together, tested together, can be deployed together and supported together to provide faster fail-over, improved reliability and up to 10x better application performance.”
What about Storage?
Oracle Solaris ZFS provides data and storage management for Oracle Solaris 11. The OS aims to deliver the ultimate data integrity with flash-enabled tiered storage pools, line speed encryption and the scalability to store and manage unlimited amounts of data.
Customers can also substantially reduce their storage requirements in virtualized environments by using this Cloud OS.
Is this an ideal future platform for businesses?
Oracle Solaris 11 is the ideal platform to run business-critical enterprise applications in a virtualized massive horizontal scale. Customers also have access to the following:
- Run any of the more than 11,000 applications supported today on Oracle Solaris 11, with guaranteed binary compatibility through the Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee Program.
- Preserve their existing investments and move their existing Oracle Solaris 10 environments to an Oracle Solaris 10 Zone, while still allowing, access to the latest Oracle Solaris 11 enhancements.
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