SCIENCE

Oracle has announced immediate availability of Oracle Solaris 11 Express, demonstrating Oracle’s continued commitment and R&D investment in Oracle Solaris.

Oracle Solaris 11 Express delivers advanced Oracle Solaris features that have been in development for over five years in an easy to use, production-ready package, allowing customers to immediately use the latest Oracle Solaris features to deploy new applications.

New availability features greatly reduce planned downtime by up to 50%, virtually eliminating traditional patching and maintenance related reboots and vastly improving system boot time to tens of seconds.

Oracle Solaris 11 Express adds network virtualization and resource management to the complete, built-in virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris, providing the highest performance virtualization environment with the lowest overhead.

Oracle Solaris 11 Express will also power the Oracle Exadata X2-2 and X2-8 Database Machines, as well as the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud machine.

My Oracle Support telemetry integration with the Oracle Solaris in-depth fault management architecture allows customers to receive proactive and preemptive support that reduces service outages from known issues.

Oracle Solaris is the #1 enterprise operating system, providing mission-critical availability, security and performance on both SPARC and x86 systems.

Oracle Solaris 11 preserves guaranteed binary compatibility with over 11,000 third-party products and customer developed applications on more than 1,000 SPARC and x86 systems from Oracle and other hardware providers.

Partners in the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) will find new Oracle Solaris 11 tools and resources in the Oracle Solaris Knowledge Zone.

On Tuesday, December 7th, Oracle will be hosting a webcast on Oracle Solaris 11 Express featuring a live chat with the Oracle Solaris development team. Register for the webcast.

Key Features of Oracle Solaris 11 Express include:

Networking virtualization and resource management capabilities that increase throughput, speed up applications, and reduce network loads and complexity.

Increased Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and Java-based application performance through jointly engineered improvements, such as memory management and I/O enhancements.

ZFS enhancements for file and block de-duplication, encryption and provisioning.

Multi-tenancy with enhanced security for today's virtual and cloud environments implementing the latest security standards.

Further reductions in number of maintenance operations that require a reboot.

Fast Reboot, which allows customers to recover systems and databases in tens of seconds verses tens of minutes.

Leading edge patching, upgrade and installation capabilities designed to reduce risk and greatly simplify the most common system administrator tasks.

Maximum performance and scale for future hardware that will scale to tens of thousands of hardware threads, hundreds of terabytes of system memory and hundreds of Gigabits of I/O.

A built in snapshot facility that always keeps a backup of the system boot image and allows customers to revert back to the old version with a simple reboot.

Supporting Quotes

“We are excited to announce the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express to enable our customers to deploy the new advanced features of Solaris 11 across a broad set of platforms, as well as Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. “Through the same engineering disciplines that achieved legendary mission-critical reputation for Oracle Solaris, we are expecting Oracle Solaris 11 to further reduce any downtime by being quicker and easier to deploy, maintain and update; and deliver a highly efficient, virtualized operating system to meet the scale and performance requirements of immediate and future virtualization and Cloud-based deployments.”