Oracle bolsters former Sun Unix platform

Oracle detailed on Wednesday upgrades to the Solaris Unix OS it inherited from Sun Microsystems, offering improvements in such areas as virtualization.

The company announced Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, and Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2. Oracle emphasized that Solaris is designed to leverage large memory and multi-core processor/thread systems as well as offer high performance, security, and scalability.

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“Oracle Solaris provides the proven, enterprise-class reliability, security, and performance customers need for their most mission-critical and essential applications,” said John Fowler, executive vice president of Systems and a holdover from Sun, in a statement released by the company. Sun was acquired by Oracle early this year.

Solaris 10 9/10 features networking and performance enhancements, virtualization, updates to Solaris ZFS (Zettabyte File System) and capabilities to leverage the latest SPARC and x86 processors, Oracle said. Also featured are fixes and hardware support in an “easy-to-install manner,” preserving compatibility with more than 11,000 third-party products and customer applications, Oracle said.

Version 10 9/10 offers networking and database optimizations for Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters). Also, Solaris Containers now provide enhanced P2V (Physical to Virtual) capabilities, for moving from existing Oracle Solaris 10 physical systems to virtual containers.

Virtualized Solaris instances become more reliable in the new release when deployed using Oracle VM for SPARC, also known as Logical Domains, Oracle said. ZFS, meanwhile, features tools to aid in recovering from problems related to unplanned downtime. ZFS also offers online device management, for making changes to file system configurations without taking data offline.

Solaris Cluster 3.3 offers enterprise high availability and disaster recovery. It enables virtual application clusters via Oracle Solaris Containers in Oracle Geographic Edition. The product integrates with the Oracle WebLogic Server application server as well as with Siebel CRM, MySQL Cluster, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, enabling consolidation in virtualized environments.

The cluster product also supports InfiniBand on public networks. Security capabilities include Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions, for mission-critical applications and services, Oracle said.

Solaris Studio 12.2 features a suite of tools for building single, multithreaded and distributed applications, Oracle said. It features an IDE with a code-aware editor and workflow.