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Solaris 11.1 Enhances Cloud Infrastructure, Adds 300 Features

• By Leila Meyer
• 10/09/12

Oracle has released a new version of its, Solaris. Oracle Solaris 11.1 features more than 300 new features and upgrades, including improved performance, availability, and throughput for Oracle databases; new cloud infrastructure features; and improved availability for enterprise applications.

The Oracle Solaris 11 cloud operating system enables customers to build large-scale infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS) clouds on SPARC and x86 servers and engineered systems. It's also the operating system for many of Oracle's products, including the SPARC T-Series server line, SPARC SuperCluster T4-4, Oracle Exadata Database Machine, and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud engineered systems.

Key features in Oracle Solaris 11.1 include:

• Improved lock latency of Oracle Real Application Clusters by offloading lock management to the kernel;
• Ability to resize the Oracle Database system global area (SGA) without rebooting;
• Oracle Solaris DTrace, which makes it easier for administrators to observe and understand input/output bottlenecks;
• Send system audit results to the Oracle Audit Vault to simplify compliance reporting for the overall Oracle Database platform;
• OpenSCAP, a new compliance reporting tool and Payment Card Industry profile, which helps administrators create compliance reports to meet auditor requirements;
• Support for 32 TB of RAM and thousands of CPUs;
• Support for the new, open standard Federated File System (FedFS) providing unified namespace for cloud-scale data environments;
• Expanded support for Software Defined Networks (SDN), including enhancements to Edge Virtual Bridging for improved network resource usage and bandwidth maximization in cloud environments;
• Updates to Oracle Solaris Zone to provide up to four times faster performance than Oracle Solaris 11;
• Automatic shared storage support to make it easier to move Oracle Solaris Zones between systems;
• Secure, virtual deployment of Oracle Solaris 10 and 11 applications;
• High-speed, application-driven failover in Oracle Solaris Zone clusters;
• Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance replication for disaster recovery failover between geographically separated data centers;
• Multilevel security support for clustered environments with Oracle Solaris Trusted Extensions.

Oracle Solaris 11 customers can upgrade using the operating system's built-in upgrade tools.

Further information about Oracle Solaris 11.1 is available on the Oracle site.