Solaris 11: Oracle Launches Cloud OS

Solaris: Oracle Launches Cloud OS

Launch Video:
Oracle launched Solaris 11 on November 11, 2010, with real-time streaming. The replay is available.

Highlights:

Oracle President Mark Hurd opens the Solaris 11 Launch

• Connected Cloud Management
• Zero Overhead Virtualization
  This is Zones, formerly Solaris Containers.
• Cloud Scale
  True linear scalability
• 2700 Projects
• 400 innovations
• 750 customers using Solaris 11

Mark Hurd also talks about how Solaris is the #1 UNIX:

• #1 for UNIX shipments for past decade
• #1 for Oracle deployments
• Largest application portfolio breaking 11,000+
• Over 60,000 Solaris Customers

Investment protection is discussed: upgradable from T4 to T5. SPARC SuperCluster solution brings together benefits of SPARC with benefits of Exadata.

Oracle showed a quick video with various testimonials:

• Solaris customers are aggressive users of technology
  Use technology to differentiate their businesses from others
• Decrease total cost of ownership (TCO)
  Provide high performance and highly scalable engineered solutions
• Solaris scales from a single node to multiple nodes
• Multi-threaded architecture
  Run more applications and process more transactions with fewer CPU's
• ZFS is the core capability to drive use of Solaris 11
  Manages large amounts of data, mirrors across chassis
• Oracle Non-Global Zones and Oracle RAC
  74% reduction in support costs
• Compare Oracle SPARC, HP HPUX, and IBM AIX
  Competition costs 3x more than SPARC Solaris
• Scalability & Securely support dramatic growth

Oracle Executive Vice President John Fowler takes the stage

Talks about Solaris 11

• #1 UNIX, incorporate into cloud deployments, engineer to run Oracle better
• Solaris has more deployments than AIX and HPUX combined
• 11,000 certified independent software vendor applications for Solaris
• Thousands of companies produce software for Solaris
• Cloud level deployment for Solaris
• Operating Systems get better over time as they add capability and features

The opening statement:

• Optimized to run all of your applications faster
  Solaris runs Everything
  - the most critical applications
  - tier 2 or tier 3 applications

The major points:

1. Kernel Enhancements - Built for next-decade hardware
   - hundreds of cores, thousands of threads
   - tens of terabytes of memory
   - double digit gigabyte network performance
   - hundreds of improvements in Solaris
   - engineering through the stack provides best performance
   - best performance in all application tiers
   - engineered for scale
   - engineered for high performance applications
   - engineered for efficiency in running the oracle stack and other applications

1. Virtualization - Designed in virtualization at every layer
   - don't build toys, we are not a toy company
   - supported, high-service, high-availability, secure mission critical applications
   - availability designed at every level, not just a virtual machine
   
   
2. Data - at a cloud
   - SAN, NAS, share block devices, share file systems
   - common data services in the operating system
   - de-duplication, compression, encryption, flash aware storage pools
   - move storage services next to application




3. Security - Engineered Security at Every Layer of System
   - Defense in depth
   - Multi-tenancy in design
   - delegated administration
   - robust auditing
   - immutable zones
   - network & data layer protection
   - encrypted data per-tenant
   
   
   
   
4. Life Cycle Management - Cloud Deployment
   - Cloud repository for packages and patches
   - Local repositories, key validated & encrypted
   - patch updates in the orders of minutes instead of hours
   - fast reboots of zones
   - cloned zones with rollback options
   - proven Oracle VM templates for Oracle run time applications
   - incorporate own software applications into repositories
   - rapid and safe deployment and rollback

Steve Wilson of Vice President of Engineering, Systems

1. Management Story - Hardware, OS, and Application
   - Solaris 11 host self-service cloud environment
   - Connect to cloud services at oracle
   - Ability to manage Oracle applications
   
2. Solaris 11 Enterprise Manager Ops Center
   - Dashboard for self-service cloud on Solaris 11
   
   - Visibility of clouds, storage, servers, switches, networks, disks, volumes
   
   - Visibility of users, quotas, usage
   
   - Visibility to capacity issues, impending failures, security patches
   
   - Automatic service request creation at Oracle
   - Ability to apply patches to thousands of servers at once, according to policy
   - OS Level Analytics
   
3. Oracle Enterprise Cloud Control Integration
   - Ops Center Drill-Down
   
   - Review Analytics correlated to Oracle Application issue
   
   - Update operating system characteristics (i.e. network flow)

Oracle Executive Vice President John Fowler takes the stage for Solaris SPARC updates

• SPARC and Solaris 5 Year Roadmap
  - nearly half-complete
  - all on-time
  - some future products in labs today
  - will continue the drum beat of products
• Binary Compatibility
• Investment Protection
• No forced migration from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11
• Constant output of activity
• Classic Microprocessor Investment in SPARC
• Adding Enterprise Application Acceleration
  - De-Compression added for Oracle RDBMS
  - Acceleration for RAC clustering
  - Native support for underlying data formats
• Solaris 12 will eventually come

Mark Hurd & John Fowler - Questions and Answers session

• Mark - Strategy for supporting Solaris 11 on SPARC and x86
  Will support both!
  Solaris moved to x86 to embrace blade market, other UNIX platforms did not
• John - Will new updates have to wait until Solaris 12?
  No, we provide stability for the customer, new capabilities will arrive in Solaris 11 Update 1
• Mark - What is the most important reason to move from IBM to Oracle?
  Speed, Performance, TCO, Supportability, ISV availability, x86 availability, scalability, cloud connectability, steady stream of announcements, performance telemetry, commitment to product set
• John - How long will Oracle support Solaris 10
  Solaris 1o update coming for T5 & M4, then a 10 year extended support
• John - Oracle [RDBMS] is moving to 12c, when will Solaris be called 12c?
  Larry runs naming. Oracle RDBMS 12c will be rock-solid on Solaris
• John - How secure is data in the cloud?
  Most people are not encrypting data in the cloud.
  Hardware does encryption at line-speed and wire-speed on the file system, network, and even in Oracle table space with virtually no impact. Oracle offers what no other provider does.
• John - De-duplication is a huge improvement potential. How huge?
  This is huge, copies are made for data protection and archive, with huge numbers of copies. ZFS at the OS offers dedup and compression. Only OS which includes dedup built in.
• John - Many customers are running Java, what makes Solaris good to run Java?
  Significant effort into: scheduler, memory manager, networking stack, compiler, observability into JVM, analytic tools
• John - Policy question: solaris images on Amazon Elastic Cloud?
  Available on OTN for customers, today. Only an hour into launch!
• John - Biggest question today.
  Life Cycle Management - Cloud accelerates this requirement. Cloud amplifies it, takes away SLA.
  Security - substantial technology