Here is a little press review around the launch of Oracle Solaris 11:
The following is a list of links to recent benchmarks which used Oracle Solaris 11.
Oracle Solaris 11 is certified on SPARC and X86-based platforms as conforming to the UNIX 03 product standard, effective November 8, 2011, per The Open Group.
'Absolutely spanking' IBM and HP
More importantly, the delay is the result of Oracle's desire to fully leverage the Sparc processor, the Solaris operating system, and the Oracle stack of database, middleware, and application software as a highly tuned system with a better system for testing and patching software in the entire stack as it changes and thereby allowing Oracle to command a premium for Sparc-based systems because they are easier to operate and support.
This is, of course, the old AS/400 value proposition that IBM has been selling its midrange customers for more than two decades. The difference now is that Oracle actually believes it, and IBM, which makes a lot more money selling services to integrate piece parts and support them than selling its Power Systems running the integrated IBM i software stack, can't afford to.
Fowler opened up his technical review of Solaris 11 by reminding everyone that Solaris had more deployments than HP-UX and AIX combined, and added that "operating systems are something that only improve over time."
Fowler said that Solaris 10, which was launched in January 2005, would be getting its own updates soon and would, in fact, be supported on future Sparc T5 and M4 systems due next year.
On roadmaps for the past year and a half, Fowler has shown that Oracle's long-term goal is to deliver in late 2014 or early 2015 a machine that has 64 sockets with a total of 16,384 threads and supporting 64TB of main memory.
Oracle Solaris 11 is the first operating system engineered with cloud computing in mind. We believe you should expect more from your OS -- especially as you start considering public, private and hybrid clouds for enterprise-class workloads.
And what's most important: all of this is integrated, engineered and optimized to work together: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's the power of this that makes Oracle Solaris unique.
Today's the big release for Oracle Solaris 11, after 7 years of development. For me, the Solaris 11 release comes a little more than 11 years after I joined the X11 engineering team at what was then Sun, and finishes off some projects that were started all the way back then.
In total, we recorded 1512 change request id's during Solaris 11 development, from the time we forked the “Nevada” gate from the Solaris 10 release until the final code freeze for todays release - some were one line bug fixes, some were man page updates, some were minor RFE's and some were major projects, but in the end, the result is both very different (and hopefully much better) than what we started with, and yet, still contains the core X11 code base with 24 years of backwards compatibility in the core protocols and APIs.
"Having been involved in various projects around the upcoming Solaris 11 release, we had the possibility to compile a list of features we assume UNIX Engineers will find to be cornerstones of Solaris 11 based platforms. It wasn't easy to keep the list short, due to the sheer amount of innovation and the tight integration of the new- or updated technologies in this Solaris release.
We have planned a series of blog posts with a short preview of each Solaris 11 technologies in the list, in a Question and Answer form."
This is the first post, featuring Boot Environments.
The delayed release has been much-anticipated because Solaris still matches the combined user base for HP-UX and AIX, Oracle executive vice president of systems John Fowler claimed. However the transition from Sun to Oracle has hit the server division quite hard and Oracle is no doubt hoping that the new OS release will help turn the tide.
Solaris, a Unix implementation, was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired last year. While not as widely known for its cloud software, Oracle has been marketing Solaris as a cloud-friendly OS. In Oracle's architecture, users can set up different partitions, called Zones, inside a Solaris implementation, which would allow different workloads to run simultaneously, each within their own environment, on a single machine.
I have had a few hours to try the final Solaris 11 release, overall I think it is far more stable and polished than the previous "Early Adaptors" release. Besides the fact that I am unable to use semi-old SPARC gear to test the release since only the latest generations of hardware are supported I have found few real problem so far.
Watch as Oracle executives Mark Hurd and John Fowler announce the launch of Oracle Solaris 11, which brings proven enterprise capabilities to private, public, and hybrid clouds. Oracle Solaris 11 is the industry's best UNIX operating system with unique features including advanced file system technologies, advanced security, and built-in virtualization in every dimension.
Learn how Oracle Solaris 11 has been engineered, tested, and supported to get the most of SPARC and x86 systems including Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and SPARC SuperCluster engineered systems.
Full highlights of the launch of Oracle Solaris 11.