Oracle announces world's first cloud OS

Oracle released Solaris 11 at the beginning of November – described as ‘a milestone,’ it was also the first significant update since Oracle had acquired the operating system as part of the Sun takeover back in 2009.

“It’s been years in development and has solved a number of problems related to deploying next-generation datacentres and cloud computing systems,” said Charlie Boyle, Oracle senior director of product marketing.

There were also huge improvements, according to Boyle, in the scale and performance of the core features, including a better working relationship with Oracle’s software stack and hardware.

Oracle engineering teams are working on solving the issues surrounding hardware and software integration into the cloud, according to Markus Flieri, Oracle’s software development vice president.

“A big challenge for customers running thousands of physical nodes was provisioning, updating and rebooting these nodes. So a lot of administration was needed there,” said Flierl.

When introducing virtual nodes on physical systems Flieri said the admin effort has to go up ‘exponentially.’

Thus, Solaris 11 now has a Boot Environment feature - which gives users an environment for their systems, which is a good four times faster than in Red Hat environs.

The new release can boast OS virtualisation, network resources virtualisation, enhanced security, and a lock down system on the public cloud – meaning the whole infrastructure is protected from malicious and accidental modification.

Including better database memory sharing, plus health check and patch management - it appears Oracle have covered everything.