Oracle Solaris

Oracle Solaris is an initially commercial UNIX-based, closed source operating system.

Oracle Solaris 9, released in 2002, began to be distributed free of charge under the CDDL license, but without support, documentation and some closed software (Value Added Software). In the summer of 2005, Sun decided to open part of the system source code (CDDL) and launch the Solaris OpenOracle project

Oracle Solaris is known for its scalability (especially on the SPARC platform) and reliability. The operating system includes a number of important functions, such as the dynamic task trace system DTrace, 128-bit ZFS (Zetta-byte File System) with the ability to instantly roll back and constant verification of checksums. Oracle Solaris runs on SPARC and x86 computers.

In 2005, Sun Microsystems opened the source code for the Oracle Solaris operating system and created the Solaris OpenOracle community to further develop and improve the product. At the time of writing, the current production version is Oracle Solaris 10. In 2008 the community OpenOracle Solaris released the first release of the OpenOracle Solaris 2008.05 operating system.

History

2022

Introducing the sysdiff utility for migrating applications to Solaris 11.4-based environments

On May 2, 2022, it became known that Oracle published a sysdiff utility that simplifies the transfer of old applications from Solaris 10 to Solaris 11.4-based environments. More details here.

Solaris 11.4 SRU 44

On April 20, 2022, it became known that Oracle published an update to the Solaris 11.4 SRU 44 (Support Repository Update) operating system, which offers a series of next fixes and improvements for the Solaris 11.4 branch. To install the patches proposed in the update, run the 'pkg update' command. Users can also use the free version of Solaris 11.4 CBE (Common Build Environment), developed using the continuous publishing model of subsequent versions.

In this release: Updated versions of programs with vulnerability recovery: Apache Web Server 2.4.53, Django 2.2.27, Firefox 91.7.0esr, Samba 4.13.17, Thunderbird 91.7.0, Twisted 22.2.0, libexpat 2.4.6, opensl 1.0.2zd, opensl-11 1.1.1n, opensl-3 3.0.2, library/library and utility.

Addressed 6 vulnerabilities that affect the core and regular utilities. The most serious problem in the utilities is assigned a hazard level of 8.2. Details Not Specified^[1]

2017

Oracle carried out a murderous reduction in SPARC and Solaris developers

Oracle conducted a large-scale staff reduction in the summer of 2017, affecting mainly Solaris operating system developers and SPARC microprocessor architecture, as well as tape libraries and storage. Judging by the records on the message board of The Layoff, a total of about 2.5 thousand^[2] workers were fired^[3]

The company itself did not make any statements in this regard - its employees who fell under reduction reported layoffs on the Internet. In particular, Drew Fisher, senior developer of Python and OpenStack for Solaris, wrote about this on the Twitter social network.

«It's true. Oracle has reduced most of Solaris (and others) today, "he said. Fisher himself also lost his job, about which he wrote separately: "Oracle gave Dobby a sock! Dobby is free! Does anyone need a Python developer with 15 + years experience

The Fate of Solaris

IT columnist Simon Phipps also confirmed on Twitter that "about the entire" technical staff of the Solaris project (he used the designation "~ all") was fired. Phipps believes that this indicates the "end of life" of the product being developed. Nevertheless, he noted that a small number of developers remained in their places. Other records on The Layoff indicate that not so long ago, "hundreds" of workers were transferred from the Solaris team to Oracle's Linux department.

A new wave of cuts will stop the development of ZFS Storage Appliance storage systems, but the fate of Solaris and SPARC remains uncertain, writes The Register. Oracle announced its intention to support Solaris until 2030, so users will not be abandoned. Given that the frames transferred to the Linux department can devote part of their time to Solaris, the company should not have difficulty updating this OS, writes The Register. The last major changes were made to Solaris three years ago with the release of Solaris 11.

However, if Oracle pauses the development of SPARC, it can cut off the cloud evacuation path to users of platforms created in Sun. This decision suggests that Oracle's plans to create a SPARC-compatible cloud did not receive the necessary support, notes The Register.

Continuous Solaris Upgrade

On January 26, 2017, Oracle announced that Solaris will not undergo significant updates, but in the coming years the company will continue to support this OS.

After announcing the dismissal of 1,800 employees, most of whom worked on SPARC and Solaris, users decided that Oracle was closing the Solaris direction. However, Oracle announced that it was moving the OS to a continuous delivery model^[4]

Solaris Roadmap, (2017)

With this update release model, instead ON of releasing as assemblies with a frequency of six months, as in the case of, and Ubuntu Linux up to a year, as in the case of, the Microsoft Windows code is issued as a constant stream. This approach is commonly used in flexible cloud software development projects that value the ability to adapt to changing business needs.

The corresponding announcement was made by Oracle to abandon the release plans for the next, main, release of Solaris 12.

The company claims that "new features and features will be included in Oracle Solaris through point releases, and not through more revolutionary major releases... This meets customer requirements for a flexible and seamless transition from one version to another, ensuring continuity of innovation with guaranteed investment protection. By moving to a continuous update model based on Oracle Solaris 11, customers will get a smooth upgrade process that is more consistent with their migration to flexible deployment models. "

As Oracle plans to integrate SPARC and Solaris into its Oracle Cloud, analysts consider this step reasonable. But, for continuous integration, test, support, development, and operations teams must work as one. But after these people were fired...

It is assumed that Solaris 11.ntext, replacing Solaris 12, will become a version with long-term support - it will make the necessary corrections, including security, but not significant changes.

Oracle will support Solaris for a long time - Premier support until January 2031, and expanded support until January 2034.

Oracle confirmed that Solaris will continue to be supported in the cloud on the SPARC Model 300 platform as a IaaS and as a guest OS in Oracle Compute Cloud Service.

2016: Docker Support

On September 28, 2016, Oracle announced how it will support Docker in Oracle Solaris.

According to the company, the containers will use the main features of Solaris, in particular - security, efficient virtualization, ZFS cloning and an intelligent file system, multi-platform compatibility for the architecture of SPARC and x86 processors.

2015

Oracle Solaris 11.3

On November 26, 2015, Oracle announced the release of Solaris 11.3.

This release supports SQL in Silicon databases, Security in Silicon technologies, Secure Live Migration and Secure Lifecycle Management, automated updates, and high availability for OpenStack. Oracle Solaris 11.3 is available for download or upgrade.

Oracle Solaris 11.3 - Security View. Speed. Simplicity (2015)

Markus Flierl, vice president of Oracle Solaris Core Technology, said:

- With Oracle Solaris 11.3, we provide a secure cloud platform. In addition to our unique security capabilities, such as secure virtualization and temporary access control, we use Silicon Secured Memory in SPARC M7 processors to help prevent common cyber attacks, such as buffer overflow and overwriting. With hardware offloads, new features enable encryption for data and network traffic, as well as real-time migration with a wide range of encryption modes so customers don't have to choose between security and performance.

System Tasks

Oracle Solaris 11.3 seamlessly integrates with Security in Silicon, a technology built into Oracle SPARC M7 processors that significantly improves security for current and future applications. Oracle Solaris 11.3 uses Silicon Secured Memory, which helps prevent common cyber attacks such as buffer overflow and buffer overwriting. In addition, Oracle Solaris 11.3 widely uses hardware acceleration of encryption in SPARC M7 for databases, Java, existing applications, ZFS file system and network traffic, allows you to hot move virtual machines without compromising performance.

Deploy to Oracle Solaris 11.3 and upgrade your secure environment with three features:

• Patching and updating the entire stack to create complete, secure, and signed software suites that include applications, operating system, and firmware (firmware) that are validated during download.
• immutable virtual machines that prevent unauthorized installation of additional software or configuration changes.
• Automated update and one-step patching through a trusted path to easily and securely update unmodified virtual machines. This provides complete blocking of access to virtual machine content, including built-in audit and compliance reporting.

Integration with Oracle Database - Oracle Database In-Memory and Oracle Solaris 11.3 fully support the capabilities of SQL in Silicon technology built into SPARC M7 processors, which allows you to increase database query performance up to 10 times for current enterprise software and next-generation analytical applications. Critical features, such as dynamic resource management and an integrated high-performance lock manager for Oracle RAC, make Oracle Solaris 11.3 the most dynamic platform for providing a database-as-a-service (DBaaS). Comprehensive monitoring (observability) of the complete stack in conjunction with troubleshooting, implemented by DTrace functions, allows you to perform simple analysis - from the database to the operating system kernel - to troubleshoot and configure the database in real time.

With Oracle Solaris 11.3, security capabilities are available from the OpenStack. Oracle Solaris 11.3 provides automated update and instant rollback features that use ZFS boot environments. OpenStack Heat provides consistent management of tiered applications. Ironic provides deployment of "bare" (bare metal - without software) hardware resources. Using Oracle Solaris Cluster helps maintain fault tolerance at all levels by automatically reloading services, removing faulty hardware, and recovering from disaster. The DBaaS application of Oracle Murano allows you to deploy plug-in databases to improve performance up to 5x.

Using Java, Oracle Solaris Studio, and Oracle SPARC M7 systems, Oracle Solaris 11.3 provides a platform for DevOps development methodology. With Oracle Solaris Studio, developers can improve code performance by quantifying the impact of code on hardware resources while improving their own performance. C and C++ developers can take advantage of Silicon Secured Memory through Discover in Oracle Solaris Studio and instantly detect programming errors like invalid pointers without compromising application performance. Developers can also leverage this integrated continuous deployment environment for secure lifecycle management with OpenStack.

Docker integrates into Oracle Solaris

On August 19, 2015, Oracle announced plans to integrate Docker into Oracle Solaris. Integration will help you use the open Docker platform to easily distribute applications created and deployed using Oracle Solaris Zones virtualization technology built into Oracle Solaris.

Oracle plans to prepare Docker images for a number of software products that include Oracle WebLogic Server. The goal is development and testing.

Oracle Solaris Zones appeared in Solaris more than 10 years ago as Solaris Containers. It provides scalability, full resource isolation, and security that is critical to the enterprise IT environment. Oracle Solaris Zones can be used as "hardware batches" for most enterprise applications, limiting the number of licenses used.

According to developers, the announced integration will provide the advantages of both platforms - access to enterprise-class tools provided by Oracle Solaris for security, resource isolation and diagnostics with the ability to easily create containers in productive environments, development/testing environments, and cloud computing. Integration of Docker into Oracle Solaris will provide even greater simplicity and close integration of technologies deployed in the enterprise and in the cloud.

Solaris v.11.3 beta release released

On July 13, 2015, Oracle introduced the release of the Solaris 11.3 operating system^[5].

A beta version of Solaris 11.3 has been prepared for download, with installation images available for the x86-64 and SPARC architectures. For the x86 architecture, a Live demo system is optional.

The OS has added a packet filter PF and OpenSSH (in addition to fork SunSSH), live migration for Kernel Zones and hot zone reconfiguration, support for verified boot, support for LZ4 compression and recursive snappshot comparison in ZFS, implementation of Application Data Integrity buffer overflow protection technology (ADI).

2014

Oracle Solaris 11.2

On April 29, 2014, Oracle introduced a new version of the Oracle Solaris 11.2 operating system.

The new version of the OS allows IT services to deploy cloud service from scratch in minutes, with reliability, security and performance corresponding to the corporate class.

Features

• As part of Oracle Solaris 11.2, the complete OpenStack package complements the Oracle Solaris environment with functionality and provides management of other hypervisors and infrastructure in the data center.

• Oracle Solaris 11.2 simplifies and accelerates lifecycle management tasks compared to previous releases.

• The new release has an integrated hypervisor for SPARC and x86 architectures, for zero overhead virtualization, in addition to the existing Oracle Solaris Zones virtualization tools.

• Oracle Solaris 11.2 provides a technology software-configurable networks (custom-built applications) that integrates with, and Oracle Java Oracle Database Oracle Applications to deliver quality of service at the application level.

• Oracle Solaris 11.2 is designed to deliver record-breaking performance and efficiency when deployed with Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance.

Oracle Solaris 11.2 available for download

On August 6, 2014, Oracle announced that Oracle Solaris 11.2 was available for boot.

Using the Unified Archive template and the OpenStack package included with Oracle Solaris 11.2, companies can deploy a ready-to-use cloud in just 10 minutes.

Oracle Solaris 11.2 significantly reduces compliance costs with built-in compliance reporting tools and simple problem-solving instructions.

Oracle Solaris offers unique security features and built-in virtualization for high scalability at low cost.

Oracle Solaris 11.2 improves virtualization flexibility by supporting zones with different versions of kernel updates.

Solaris 11.1

Oracle has implemented a number of new features in the Solaris 11.1 operating system that extend its capabilities as a cloud hosting platform. Oracle itself uses Solaris on SPARC T-Series servers, as well as in its hardware and software complexes.

Solaris 11.1 was the first OS to support the new Federated File System (FedFS) open standard. It is a file system that combines multiple NFS file systems. It allows you to display in a single display the directories of files stored in different geographical regions and on different hardware platforms.

Solaris has a number of features designed to support software-defined networks. With Data Center Bridging technology, Ethernet adapters can carry both normal network and storage network traffic, eliminating the need for dedicated hardware. And Edge Virtual Bridging allows you to create virtual LANs without configuring data center switches.

In addition, according to Oracle, Solaris Zones environments began to work four times faster. In zones, you can perform different tasks in parallel on the same machine, each in its own isolated environment. It is now also possible to move zones between servers.

The new shared memory optimization interface between Oracle and Oracle Solaris 11.1 provides an 8-fold faster start-up and stop of databases and the ability to resize the system global scope in Oracle (System Global Area, SGA) databases without rebooting.

Oracle Solaris 11.1 introduces new capabilities for optimizing Oracle database performance. Oracle Solaris DTrace I/O interfaces in Oracle Solaris 11.1 allow Oracle database administrators to identify I/O bottlenecks, networks, and storage, and then isolate them.

With the new Oracle Solaris DTrace plug-in for Oracle Java Mission Control, users can profile Java applications on existing Oracle Solaris systems.

New cloud management features extend Oracle Solaris 11 "s built-in system, network, and storage virtualization capabilities, including enhanced Software Defined Networks (SDN) support with Edge Virtual Bridging enhancements to maximize network resource utilization and bandwidth management in cloud environments.

The new memory access prediction engine tracks memory usage and optimizes memory page sizes as well as resource locations, thereby improving overall application performance.

Support for 32 TB of RAM and thousands of CPU helps unlock the full potential of new Oracle server systems.

The new Oracle Solaris 10 Zone clustering capability enables users to consolidate critical applications running Oracle Solaris 10 into Oracle Solaris 11 cloud environments.

Advanced disaster recovery tools using Oracle Sun ZFS Storage Appliance and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 in the event of application failures and data loss provide a coordinated failover to a remote site to restore health.

Improved storage fault detection and resource dependency management helps you resume applications faster.

New label-based security in Oracle Solaris Zone clusters allows you to separate applications according to the requirements of the defense industry in highly consolidated systems designed to solve critical tasks using Oracle Solaris 11 Trusted Extensions.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides Oracle Solaris 11 with comprehensive cloud management capabilities, including the ability to automatically allocate resources to Oracle Solaris 11 zones. Integrated management tools in OpsCenter deliver high-performance cloud infrastructures. Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center is available for free to Oracle Solaris users through the Ops Center Everywhere Program.

Oracle Solaris Studio contains a new optimized compiler and analytical development tools that support multi-threaded programming and application optimization for reliable operation on Oracle Solaris 11.1 systems.

Oracle Solaris 11 provides guaranteed binary compatibility with previous versions of Oracle Solaris with the Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee Program, which provides users with a simple system upgrade solution and industry-leading investment protection. Oracle Solaris Legacy Containers enable you to migrate older Oracle Solaris environments to the latest hardware platforms, enabling consolidation to save power and cooling costs and reduce server space.

2011

Solaris 11

In November 2011, Oracle announced the release of the latest version of its Solaris 11 operating system. According to the company, this implementation is best suited for cloud workloads.

A number of features have been added to the update of the Unix-like Solaris operating system, which to a greater extent led to its readiness to deploy in the cloud, as well as tighter integration with other Oracle products, the company announced.

According to Charlie Boyle, Senior Director of Product Marketing, in this release, the company was able to reorganize some of the complexities of cloud infrastructure management and make it possible to launch any Solaris applications in the cloud environment.

Markus Flierl, Oracle's vice president of software development, noted that cloud deployments require a much higher level of automation and optimization than the usual IT infrastructure. While your organization can use hundreds of servers with the Solaris OS, it will be able to run them on thousands of Solaris virtual instances since moving its applications to the cloud infrastructure.

The initial implementation of Solaris was developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired last year. Although Oracle is not widely known for its cloud software, it promotes Solaris as a cloud-friendly system. In the Oracle architecture on the Solaris system, users can configure different partitions called Zones, which allows them to run different workloads simultaneously, each in their own environment and on the same machine.

Oracle Solaris Zones consumes 15 times less resources than VMware implementation, says Oracle. The company also advertises Zone's lack of artificial restrictions on memory, network, processors and storage resources.

Flirl noted that many of the new functions were designed to reduce administrative costs during the launch of cloud-like infrastructure. One of these features, called Fast Reboot, will allow the system to boot without doing the usual hardware composition check - eliminating this action can speed up system boot by two and a half times, Oracle said.

According to the company, this feature can be useful when an administrator, using a corrective patch or software update on thousands of deployed Solaris instances, can reload them much faster. "This allows you to safely update the entire environment," Flirl said.

The new OS is equipped with a software management system called System Image Packaging, which will monitor the dependencies of programs or libraries, other software that a particular program should work with. System Image Packaging keeps all software packages of the system up-to-date, including in a virtual environment.

In addition to ensuring Solaris is ready to work in the cloud, Oracle has adapted a number of its products so that they will now be more easily linked to Solaris, including Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, and Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops administrative software package . By controlling the entire software stack, the company can create "holistic" solutions where part of the stack best provides customization to improve performance, Flirl said.

According to the Open Group specification for Unix implementations, Solaris 11 can support any programs written for earlier versions of this OS, starting with Solaris 6. The company also runs the Oracle Solaris Binary Application Guarantee Program, which certifies more than 11 thousand applications that can run on Solaris 6.

Solaris 11 will run on x86 and Sparc processor platforms.

2010

Oracle Solaris 11 Express

Oracle Solaris 11 Express enables customers to use the latest version of the Solaris operating platform to deploy applications.

New high-availability tools in Oracle Solaris 11 Express reduce planned downtime by half, virtually eliminating the need for system reboots traditionally associated with maintenance and patching, and accelerating system rebooting from tens of minutes to tens of seconds.

At the same time, Oracle Solaris 11 Express extends the full set of built-in capabilities of Oracle Solaris virtualization through new network virtualization and resource management tools, providing high performance of the virtualized environment at the lowest cost, the company noted.

In addition, Oracle Solaris 11 Express will be used as the management software of the Oracle Exata Database Machine X2-2 and X2-8, as well as the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud binding software machine.

In turn, the integration of My Oracle Support telemetry into the Oracle Solaris platform will provide customers with proactive support and will prevent forced IT system downtime due to known software and hardware problems.

According to Oracle, Oracle Solaris is an enterprise-level operating system that provides the required levels of availability, security, and performance to solve critical tasks on both SPARC and x86 platforms. Oracle Solaris 11 allows you to run more than 11 thousand third-party applications without modifying code on more than a thousand different Oracle servers and other hardware manufacturers, the company emphasized.

Solaris 11 Coming Soon

Oracle Solaris 11 is the first cloud OS that enables users to build large-scale enterprise-class cloud systems for infrastructure-as-a-service IaaS (), platform-as-a-service (), PaaS and service-as-a-service ON () solutions SaaS based on a wide range of SPARC and x86 servers, as well as optimized Oracle appliances.

In August 2010, Oracle announced plans to further develop the Solaris platform and its own server systems. At a special press conference, the company's development course in the field of software development and server solutions was announced. The Solaris 11 platform will be launched in 2011, and Oracle engineers will focus on building fully integrated server solutions and applications for tomorrow's powerful hardware systems.

Solaris 11 will be the first major operating system update released in six years. The key features of the new release will be closer support for virtualization technologies, increased scalability, and advanced management of heterogeneous systems. Updates for Solaris 11 will be released annually, until 2014. All this time, the company will continue to support the previous version of the platform - Solaris 10.

Oracle will also develop new hardware platforms optimized for faster application performance. By 2015, the performance of applications running on Oracle servers will increase forty times. To ensure such results, developers are going to quadruple the number of supported processor cores, and the amount of available RAM will be increased by 16 times and amount to 64 terabytes.

September 2010 - A preliminary version of the new Solaris 11 operating system has been released. The most notable difference between Solaris 11 and previous versions is scalability - the new platform allows you to service thousands of simultaneous data flows and hundreds of terabytes of memory.

If the current version of Solaris 10 can support hundreds of execution threads and several terabytes of memory, the new version scales to a higher level, providing extensive opportunities for creating new supercomputers and consolidating data centers. Solaris 11 has new built-in tools for virtualization and security.

Version 11 implements a technology that Oracle calls dependency-aware packaging tools. This tool can be linked to any Oracle software and hardware components to fully automate and optimize the installation of updates. The new Fast Reboot program allows customers to get their systems back to work within a few tens of seconds, not minutes, as before.

Oracle, when creating Solaris 11, focused on technologies for cloud computing. In particular, Solaris 11 provides compatibility with promising future hardware that will support huge amounts of execution threads and RAM, as well as high I/O speed measured by gigabits.

The Solaris 11 operating system will be released on Oracle X2-8 Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. In addition, by the end of 2010, the new operating system will appear in Oracle-branded storage systems. In its own form, for installation on Sparc and x86 third-party servers, the system will be available in 2011.

In addition to Solaris 11, Oracle has announced a series of updates to current Solaris family products. The series covers products based on the currently available Oracle Solaris 10 9/10 industrial operating system. There is also an updated Solaris Cluster 3.3 fault tolerance system and an updated Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2 development environment. Other updates to the Solaris 10 include significant performance improvements for systems that use Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) clusters and the Java Runtime runtime environment.

Solaris 10

Production version of Oracle Solaris 10 can be downloaded free of charge from Sun Microsystems

The latest version of OpenOracle Solaris OS can be downloaded from the website of community OpenOracle Solaris. When downloading an image, be careful, since the default is a "lightweight" image with limited localization (main languages only) and accelerated installation. In the image marked with the letter "g" (global), LZMA compression is used. This added support for 12 desktop languages. By the way, the disc can be obtained by mail completely free. To do this, select the "Get Free Media" link on the project site and fill out the form.

Although the x86 platform has been developing for Oracle Solaris for quite some time (since 1994), the list of supported devices is an order of magnitude smaller than on Linux. Some components are currently ported at an increased pace from NetBSD and other operations (provided that the license allows it) - for example, a Bluetooth stack (opensolaris.org/os/project/bluetooth). The initial stage is the development of ACPI (Suspend/Resume) and BRI. Many hardware manufacturers provide their own drivers, something is written by enthusiasts of this system. As a result, the Solaris OpenOracle comes with more drivers for many devices. The Applications menu even contains the Nvidia - Nvidia X Server Setting video card driver configuration utility.

Before installing the distribution, you must use the Device Driver Utility, the shortcut for which is located on the desktop. It will help assess hardware support on a case-by-case basis and provide a list of recommendations with the necessary drivers. The quantity of unsupported equipment is displayed in the "Driver Problems" line, and the problem equipment itself is highlighted in red. In the simplest case, press the "Install Drivers" button to install the driver. To help your project collect data, you can send information about your computer's hardware by clicking Submit.

To find compatible hardware, it is recommended to visit resources - Oracle Solaris OS: Hardware Compatibility Lists (www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl), a collection of drivers for Free NIC drivers for Oracle Solaris (homepage2.nifty.com/mrym3/taiyodo/eng) and Open Sound System (opensound.com/oss.html) network cards.

Among the projects, note Device Manager, which offers an almost ready implementation of Device Manager (www.opensolaris.org/os/project/devicemgr).

In September 2010, Oracle released an update to the Solaris 10 operating system. In parallel, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 software packages and the Oracle Solaris 12.2 application development environment were released.

The released update was tested for compatibility with other corporate solutions and popular third-party server solutions. Along with the release of the system, Solaris certification courses were updated, which included about 50,000 different questions and practical cases.

In the 10/09 version, the company increased the performance of the network subsystem and the OS core as a whole, and added new features related to virtualization based on x86 and SPARC servers. Also, a new version of the ZFS branded file system appeared in the novelty, supporting very large disk arrays.

From a hardware point of view, 10/09 supports the latest versions of the AMD and Intel x86 processors. Oracle also states that the new version is fully compatible with 11,000 third-party applications previously written for Solaris 10.

For Solaris Cluster 3.3, Oracle offers a set of solutions for building enterprise failover production clusters. Oracle Solaris Containers and Oracle Solaris Cluster Geographic Edition clustered applications are available here. It supports a cluster platform and other popular products focused on cluster environments, in particular Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle's Siebel CRM, MySQL Cluster and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g.

The cluster software package at the system level also supports Solaris Trusted Extensions to improve data security and InfiniBand technology for high-speed communication.

Solaris Studio 12.2 has new tools for developing multithreaded and distributed Solaris applications.

Notes