Oracle Announces Availability of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1

News Facts

Oracle today announced general availability of Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1.

Oracle Solaris 11 is the first cloud OS that allows customers to build large-scale enterprise-class Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) clouds on a wide range of SPARC and x86 servers and Oracle engineered systems.

Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 extends high availability and disaster recovery capabilities of Oracle Solaris and includes unique virtual cluster features supporting highly efficient application consolidation with best-in-class availability.

Oracle Solaris 11 is already widely in production with thousands of customers with mission critical deployments across industries such as financial services, communications, healthcare, retail, public sector and media and entertainment. Read customer success stories about Oracle Solaris here.

Oracle Solaris 11 is also gaining strong momentum among enterprise application vendors with hundreds of applications already qualified for Oracle Solaris Ready status through theOracle PartnerNetwork (OPN). OPN members can develop, sell and implement their solutions on Oracle Solaris 11 and take advantage of specialized Oracle Solaris resources to expand their market reach.

Customers and partners can quickly and safely upgrade to Oracle Solaris 11.1 using the built-in update tools and software repositories available with Oracle Solaris 11.

Oracle will host a webcast on November 7, 2012 at 8 a.m. Pacific time on Oracle Solaris 11.1 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, featuring Markus Flierl, vice president, Oracle Solaris Engineering, Core Technology and Bill Nesheim, vice president, Oracle Solaris Engineering, Platform Software. Register here. This event will also include an interactive chat with core developers of Oracle Solaris and Oracle Solaris Cluster.

New and Enhanced Features in Oracle Solaris 11.1

Oracle Solaris 11.1 increases the performance, availability and I/O throughput of the latest Oracle Database technology.

A new, optimized shared memory interface between the Oracle Database and Oracle Solaris 11.1 provides 8x faster database startup and shutdown, as well as online resizing of the Oracle Database System Global Area (SGA).

Oracle Solaris 11.1 introduces unique new capabilities for optimizing Oracle Database performance. Oracle Solaris 11.1 exposes Oracle Solaris DTrace I/O interfaces that allow an Oracle Database administrator to identify I/O outliers and subsequently isolate network or storage bottlenecks.

A new Oracle Solaris DTrace plug-in for Oracle Java Mission Control to enable customers to profile Java applications on Oracle Solaris production systems.

New cloud management features add to Oracle Solaris 11’s zero overhead built-in virtualization capabilities across system, network and storage resources, including expanded support for Software Defined Networks (SDN) with Edge Virtual Bridging enhancements, to maximize network resource utilization and manage bandwidth in cloud environments.

New built-in memory predictor monitors application memory use and provides optimized memory page sizes and resource location to speed overall application performance.

Support for an unprecedented 32 TB of RAM and thousands of CPUs unlocks the full potential of Oracle’s latest server systems.

Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 Highlights

New Oracle Solaris 10 Zone Clusters allow customers to consolidate mission critical Oracle Solaris 10 applications on Oracle Solaris 11 cloud environments.

Expanded disaster recovery operations using Oracle’s Sun ZFS Storage Appliance services along with Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 to coordinate failover of applications and data to a remote disaster recovery site.

Faster application recovery with improved storage failure detection and resource dependencies management.

New labeled security capability in Oracle Solaris Zone Clusters provides military grade application separation in highly consolidated mission-critical deployments using Oracle Solaris 11 Trusted Extensions.

Integrated Oracle Deployments and Support

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides comprehensive cloud management capabilities for Oracle Solaris 11, including self-service provisioning of Oracle Solaris 11 Zones. Ops Center’s integrated systems management delivers enterprise scale cloud performance. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center is available to Oracle Solaris customers at no additional cost under the Ops Center Everywhere Program.

Oracle Solaris Studio delivers the latest in compiler optimizations, multithread performance and powerful analysis tools for native development, and optimized application performance and reliability on Oracle Solaris 11.1 systems.

Oracle Solaris 11 guarantees binary compatibility with previous Oracle Solaris versions through the Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee Program, which provides customers a seamless upgrade path and the industry’s best investment protection. Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers allows older Oracle Solaris environments to be brought forward onto latest generation hardware to provide power, cooling and footprint consolidation savings.

OPN members can find Oracle Solaris tools and resources in the Oracle Solaris Knowledge Zone, including Oracle Solaris Ready,  Oracle Solaris 11 Specialization and Oracle Solaris Development Initiative.

The Oracle Solaris Remote Lab now provides a secure cloud environment for OPN members to test and validate their applications with Oracle Solaris 11 in SPARC and x86 virtual environments.