Oracle has announced immediate availability of Oracle Solaris 11 Express. In the wake of the company's abandonment of the open source version of the operating system, Oracle is hoping to still show continued commitment to the proprietary version of the technology it acquired as part of the Sun acquisition.
Oracle says that Solaris 11 Express delivers advanced features that have been in development for over five years harking back to Sun's original plans for the system. New availability features allegedly reduce planned downtime by up to 50%. If successfully implemented, the company claims that this advancement virtually eliminates traditional patching and maintenance related reboots and improves system boot time to tens of seconds.
"Oracle Solaris 11 Express adds network virtualization and resource management to the complete, built-in virtualization capabilities of Oracle Solaris, providing the highest performance virtualization environment with the lowest overhead," according to the company.
Oracle is hoping to capitalize upon the popularity of Oracle Solaris as an enterprise operating system on both SPARC and x86 systems — and is therefore using this launch to remind the industry that this product benefits from access to 11,000 third-party products and customer developed applications on SPARC and x86 systems from Oracle itself and other hardware providers.
"We are excited to announce the release of Oracle Solaris 11 Express to enable our customers to deploy the new advanced features of Solaris 11 across a broad set of platforms, as well as Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic," said John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle.
"We are expecting Oracle Solaris 11 to further reduce any downtime by being quicker and easier to deploy, maintain and update; and deliver a highly efficient, virtualized operating system to meet the scale and performance requirements of immediate and future virtualization and cloud-based deployments,” Fowler added.
