Oracle highlights Solaris Unix plans

InfoWorld - Oracle executives talked up on Thursday the planned Solaris 11 release due in 2011, with the Unix OS upgrade offering advancements in availability, security, and virtualization.

The OS will feature next-generation networking capabilities for scalability and performance, said John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, at a company event in Santa Clara, Calif. "It's a complete reworking of [the] enterprise OS," he said. Oracle took over Solaris when the company acquired Sun Microsystems early this year.

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In the availability realm, Solaris 11 will boot in seconds as opposed to minutes. It also will feature "risk-free" updates, extensive fault management, and an ability to quickly restart failed applications and services. For security, Solaris 11 will offer a secure by default startup to secure the data set as well as secure boot and enforced role-based access. Accelerated encryption, with off-load to onboard crypto, and trusted extensions will be featured, along with encrypted ZFS (Zettabyte File System) datasets. Built-in network and storage virtualization also was cited by Oracle.

Also at Thursday's event, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison expressed Oracle's intention to dominate the Linux space. "Solaris is clearly the number one Unix, and we're working very hard at making Oracle Enterprise Linux the number one Linux," he said.

Oracle released Solaris 11 Express, a version of the OS geared for developers and serving as a preview of Solaris 11, last month. The Express release cannot be used in production or commercial environments.

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