When Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, there were some concerns about how the Solaris Unix operating system would be developed.
Today those concerns were brushed aside as Oracle released its first Unix release, Solaris 11. The Solaris 11 release is being called the world’s first Cloud OS by Oracle executives, who tout the release’s new scalability, virtualization and management features.
“This is differentiated, compelling stuff,” Oracle President Mark Hurd said during the launch event for Solaris 11. “If you ever had a a question about our commitment to this product set, I hope this puts it to rest. We’re putting our money behind the product set.”
One of the key innovations that Solaris 10 delivered was virtualization zones to run applications in their own isolated containers. Solaris 11 innovates further by fully virtualizing the operating system, including the networking stack.
“We do not think of virtualization as an industry,” Fowler said. “I think of virtualization as something that is designed into the platform.”
Fowler noted that to properly deliver a virtualized environment you have to be able to integrate technology with every layer of the stack.
“For us we don’t want to build a toy, we’re not a toy company,” Fowler said. “We’re building virtualization so you can deploy the world’s most mission-critical applications.”