Oracle Magazine - January/February 2012

The First Cloud OS
Oracle Solaris 11 provides virtualization,
availability, and security for next-generation
cloud computing environments.

Oracle has officially unveiled Oracle Solaris 11, the world’s first cloud operating system (OS). The result of more than seven years of intense research and development, this latest iteration of the most widely installed enterprise UNIX provides more than 400 new features that enable organizations to deploy private, public, and hybrid cloud environments that are highly scalable, available, and secure.

Oracle President Mark Hurd formally introduced Oracle Solaris 11 during a live event from New York City’s Gotham Hall on November 9, 2011, and the OS was released that day for SPARC and x86-based systems. (Oracle Solaris 11 was previewed at Oracle Open World 2011.)

“Oracle Solaris 11 represents Oracle’s commitment to the best of breed at every level of the architecture,” said Hurd. “To put this in context, this is also part of a greater Oracle strategy and a greater overall R&D commitment we’ve made to [the Sun] portfolio.” Other recent demonstrations of that strategy and commitment include the SPARC T4 processors and the SPARC SuperCluster servers. (See “Engineered System for General-Purpose Computing,” page 22.)

NEX T-GENERATION CLOUDS John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle—also on hand at the event—said that Oracle Solaris 11 is designed not just for current enterprise systems but also for the next generation of enterprise systems and cloud environments. “These systems will support large-scale, mission-critical ERP [enterprise resource planning] and high-throughput OLTP [online transaction processing] applications,” he said. “These systems will have thousands of threads, hundreds of terabytes of memory, and double-

Executive Vice President of Systems at Oracle John Fowler (left) and Oracle President Mark Hurd officially launched Oracle Solaris 11, the world’s first cloud operating system, at a live event in New York, New York.

digit gigabyte network performance.”
A key requirement for these next-
generation systems is virtualization. “As
people go into cloud environments, they will
go from hundreds and thousands of physical
machines into environments where they
will have tens and hundreds of thousands of
virtual machines,” Fowler said.

With Oracle Solaris 11, virtualization is not a separate product that has to be layered into a system’s architecture—it is integrated right into the OS. In addition to being the first cloud OS, Oracle Solaris 11 is also the first fully virtualized OS, with server, storage, and network virtualization all built in.

Oracle Solaris 11’s virtualization technology also provides the high availability (HA) that clouds require—99.999 percent availability, according to Fowler. “Users don’t have to install HA features at each level of their stack because with Oracle Solaris 11 they’re already built in,” he said.

DATA AT CLOUD SCALE
Oracle Solaris 11 also offers advanced
data management especially designed
for the cloud environment. To accomplish
this, Fowler said, Oracle Solaris 11 moves
common data services—flash-enabled
pools, encryption, replication, duplication,
and deduplication—to the OS. Moving these
services, commonly performed in storage
systems, to the OS improves performance
and increases storage efficiencies, he said.