CTO and Evolved Technologist Editor Dan Woods says the future viability for Solaris is secure with Oracle. "No matter what your attitude is toward Oracle's products, management style and strategy, anyone running a large or small data center should breathe a sigh of relief now that the long-term viability of Solaris is assured. Without an acquisition by Oracle or Cisco, Solaris might have been put on the proverbial shelf...," he writes.

In a piece hosted on Forbes.com, Woods looks at the advantages of Solaris for business computing and offers some thoughts on Oracle's possible long-term intentions. He believes IT staff should seriously consider Solaris and he makes his point citing the following reasons:

Superior Virtualization

"What Solaris offers IT is a top-to-bottom engineered approach to virtualization where the hardware, the hypervisor, the OS and the ZFS file system are all designed to deliver optimal performance and manageability. Solaris Containers are a lightweight but powerful virtualization option with very low processing overhead (2% vs. about 20% for a hypervisor).

Scalability for Large Scale Multiprocessing

Solaris has been engineered to support massive multiprocessing. If you need to scale a single box, you can add dozens of processors, and Solaris boosts performance accordingly. Solaris also has the most scalable networking support of any operating system on the market.

Reliability

Solaris takes reliability to a new level. A feature called predictive self-healing allows failed hardware components to be swapped out without rebooting.

Security

Solaris was designed for secure networking and provides many security features, including role-based access control, a firewall and secure out-of-the-box settings.

Administration

Solaris has administration functions that allow mass changes to be made to many instances of an operating system at once and features that allow one master machine to be replicated to many other machines running a copy of the operating system. The administration capabilities have been expanded to cover the challenges of running a large number of virtual machines."

Flexible Deployment

Woods cites the ability to use a fully supported commercial product, Solaris, or OpenSolaris, the open source version where the latest features are tested. Other flexibility points: Solaris 10 can run Solaris 8 and 9 apps in Containers; runs on a huge range of hardware from x86 Intel platforms to high-end RISC servers; runs on any hardware platform, not just on Sun hardware.

Green IT

"...Sun's SPARC chip set and its servers are among the most energy efficient on the market, in some cases qualifying for utility rebates. Performing a server consolidation using Solaris and Sun hardware provides an easy way to lower carbon footprint but maintain high performance.

Oracle

Solaris will power Oracle's cloud offerings, but through appliances, Oracle will bring the cloud to the data center. ... I believe that Oracle recognizes that there are limits to the amount of enterprise IT that can be put into the cloud. Problems such as security, disaster recovery and moving huge amounts of data are significant barriers to cloud migration. But many of the same economic and operational benefits of the cloud can be achieved through remotely managed appliances that integrate software and hardware in one box. ... The customer gets all the benefits of the cloud without having to move data off premise."

More Information

"Why Oracle Wants Solaris" - by Dan Woods

Solaris Operating System Product Page

Move to Solaris 10

Sun to be Acquired by Oracle

Larry Ellison on the Acquisition of Sun Microsystems

Indepth Analysis on the Impact of the Oracle-Sun Merger

Oracle CEO Outlines Plans for Expanded Use of Java Software

Special Stockholder Meeting Set for July 16, 2009 [...read more...]

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