Oracle Updates Solaris as ‘Cloud OS’

Oracle has released Oracle Solaris 11, and updated version of its operating system that the company is positioning as “the first cloud OS.”

Oracle claims it designed the latest release of Solaris to meet the security, performance and scalability requirements of cloud-based deployments so that users can run enterprise applications in private clouds, hybrid or public clouds.

On a video replay of the launch, which was otherwise restricted from the press because of Oracle’s self-imposed quiet period, Oracle President Mark Hurd called Solaris 11 “the first cloud OS,” and said “With this OS: Game over.” The platform, Hurd said, “reflects our R&D commitment, long run, to this very important part of our portfolio.”

A story on Wired.com criticizes the lack of flash of the Solaris platform:

It’s hard these days to conceal the fact that Solaris, once the darling of the dot-coms, seems to have all of the sex appeal of an IBM minicomputer. Hurd may call Solaris the first “cloud OS,” but Solaris isn’t really a player on the kind of cutting-edge cloud data centers run by companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook. According to Jonathan Eunice, principal IT adviser with industry research firm Illuminata, Solaris is becoming the stuff that makes Oracle’s database run really fast on Oracle’s hardware. “Solaris’ pitch, especially as Oracle has spun it, is, ‘We’re a superior enterprise play … so our competition is the mainframe; it isn’t the cloud.’ And that’s colored everything they do,” he says.

The Wired.com story goes on to praise Oracle for its customer commitment:

The Solaris launch event—press-free, but loaded with customers from the financial services industry in New York—reflects Oracle’s focus on getting in the trenches with customers, something that Sun didn’t do enough. And it foreshadows the low-key future of Solaris. This new, humbler Solaris operating system doesn’t need to displace Linux as the king of cloud computing to make Oracle money. It doesn’t need to win the hearts of hip new developers, but it does need to keep Wall Street happy. If it can run Oracle’s database and middleware so well that it steals a few bucks in server sales from HP or IBM, that may be enough.

The new platform is fully virtualized, Oracle said, and provides built-in virtualization capabilities for OS, network and storage resources. Oracle Solaris 11 is engineered for Oracle VM  sever virtualization on both x86 and SPARC based systems, providing deployment flexibility and secure live migration. Oracle Solaris Zones virtualization scales up to hundreds of zones per physical node at a 15x lower overhead than VMware and without artificial limits on memory, network, CPU and storage resources.