According to the latest announcements made by Oracle on Wednesday, Solaris, the Unix-based operating System, has been recently updated by adding a variety of features. These features would make the Operating system much better for running a variety of cloud deployments. This would make the product even more useful for the Oracle products.
Charlie Boyle, senior director of product marketing in Oracle stated, “We looked at some of the big challenges that people were having in deploying cloud infrastructure, either in a private cloud or public cloud.” Adding further, he stated, “In the release, we engineered out some of the complexity in managing a cloud infrastructure, and made it possible to run any Solaris application in a cloud environment.”
Markus Flierl, Oracle vice president of software development, stated that the Cloud Deployment in Solaris requires greater automation and streaming in contrast to an average IT infrastructure. He said that any organization may run a variety of Solaris Servers but as soon as its applications are transferred to cloud infrastructure, it can be run across a variety of virtual solar instances.
Solaris was developed by Sun Microsystems, which was acquired by Oracle last year. Although Oracle is not well known for its cloud software, it is marketing Solaris as a cloud friendly Operating System. In addition, according to Oracle’s architecture, the users can set up numerous partitions known as zones in the Solaris implementation. This allows a variety of workloads to run at the same time on a single machine.
According to the marketing literature of Oracle, the Solaris zones have at least 15 times less overhead than the VMware implementations. It also stressed that the zones had no restriction on CPU, storage resources, memory and network.
According to Flierl, the new features have been exclusively designed to ease the administrative overhead issue of running a cloud-like infrastructure. They have added a new feature named Fast reboot, which empowers the system to boot up without doing hardware checkups. This helps the system to boot up at least two and a half times faster. Flierl added, “It allows you safely to upgrade your entire environment.”
The Solaris has also launched Image packing System which is a new Software management system which keeps track of program dependencies, libraries, and other related software which are required for running the program. The main work of this packing system is to keep software packages up-to-date.
New administrator controls, which are used for locking the setting in individual zones, are used to add to the Solaris Cloud Capabilities. It is used to limit the users in making changes in the system or network. It can also be used to limit the network bandwidth each zone can utilize.
Besides, making Solaris cloud compatible, Oracle has also weaved its other products in a way so they can be easily attached to Solaris. Products like Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and the Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center administrative software package are most prominently used in Solaris.