Oracle Solaris 11: The first cloud OS

Oracle today released Solaris 11, the first Cloud OS.

Oracle Solaris 11 is designed to meet the security, performance and scalability requirements of cloud-based deployments allowing customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications in private, hybrid, or public clouds.

As the first fully virtualized operating system, Solaris 11 provides comprehensive, built-in virtualization capabilities for OS, network and storage resources:

• In addition to its built-in virtualization capabilities, Oracle Solaris 11 is engineered for Oracle VM sever virtualization on both x86 and SPARC based systems, providing deployment flexibility and secure live migration.
• Oracle Solaris Zones virtualization scales up to hundreds of zones per physical node at a 15x lower overhead than VMware and without artificial limits on memory, network, CPU and storage resources.
• New, integrated network virtualization allows customers to create high-performance, low-cost data center topologies within a single OS instance for ultimate flexibility, bandwidth control and observability.

Oracle Solaris ZFS provides the data and storage management foundation for Oracle Solaris 11, delivering ultimate data integrity, flash-enabled tiered storage pools, line speed encryption and the scalability to store and manage unlimited amounts of data.

“Secure by default” features include start up, role-based root access and low impact auditing for both cloud and traditional datacenter deployments.

Oracle Solaris 11 delivered a new world record result on SPECjvm2008, a general-purpose, multi-threaded Java benchmark. In combination with Oracle’s SPARC T4-2 server and the Oracle HotSpot Java Virtual Machine, Oracle Solaris 11 delivers up to 41 percent improvement over the previous result using Oracle Solaris 10.