Oracle Updates Solaris And Adds New Toolkit

Oracle has delivered an update to the Solaris operating system, formerly owned by Sun Microsystems. Apart from a new version of the core operating system, Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, there is an update to the Solaris clustering software and a set of tools and compilers for developing applications.

“Oracle Solaris is now developed, tested and supported as an integrated component of Oracle’s applications-to-disk technology stack,” the company said, “which includes continuous major platform testing, in addition to the Oracle Certification Environment, representing over 50,000 test use cases for every Oracle Solaris patch and platform released.”

Networking and performance enhancements

After Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, it reassured customers that it would continue to support and develop Sun products. It also hired former HP boss Mark Hurd, boosting its excutive strength in the hardware and systems field.

Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 provides networking and performance enhancements, virtualisation capabilities, updates to Solaris ZFS and advancements to complement systems based on the latest SPARC and x86 processors. The  update also includes new features, fixes and hardware support in an easy-to-install package, preserving full compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer applications, the company said.

“Oracle Solaris provides the proven, enterprise-class reliability, security and performance customers need for their most mission-critical and essential applications,” John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, said in a statement. “Oracle Solaris 10 sets the standard for mission-critical computing. Now, through Oracle’s increased investment in technical innovation and integration with the entire Oracle hardware and software stack, we can achieve even higher levels of application performance and service levels.”

The release continued: “Oracle Solaris is designed to take advantage of large memory and multicore/processor/thread systems and enable industry-leading performance, security and scalability for both existing and new systems.”

Solaris 10 features include:

• Networking and database optimisations for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC).
• Oracle Solaris Containers now has enhanced P2V (Physical to Virtual) capabilities to allow seamlessly movement from existing Solaris 10 physical systems to virtual containers.
• Increased reliability for virtualised Solaris instances when deployed using Oracle VM for SPARC, also known as Logical Domains.
• Oracle Solaris ZFS online device management, which allows changes to file system configurations, without taking data offline.
• New Oracle Solaris ZFS tools to aid in recovering from problems related to unplanned system downtime.

The new clustering software, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, builds on Solaris to offer enterprise high availability and disaster recovery features. It enables virtual application clusters via Solaris Containers in Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition and integrates with WebLogic Server, Oracle’s Siebel CRM, MySQL Cluster and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g for consolidation in virtualised environments.

A high level of security is provided by Solaris Trusted Extensions for mission-critical applications and services. There is also connectivity support for InfiniBand on public networks and for storage systems. This is tightly integrated and validated to operate with Sun Server and Storage Systems.

The development toolkit, Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2, provides a suite of tools designed to work together for the development of single, multithreaded and distributed applications. With its integrated development environment (IDE), including a code-aware editor, workflow and project functionality, Oracle Solaris Studio is designed to increase developer productivity, the company claimed.

Solaris Studio provides high-performance C, C++ and Fortran compilers for the Solaris operating system, along with advanced multicore tools for parallel-thread performance analysis, debugging and performance libraries for SPARC and x86-based systems.