Solaris is Oracle’s Unix operating system that it picked up through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010. Oracle has been positioning Solaris as a cloud operating system since the initial Solaris 11 release in November 2011, but it is with Solaris 11.2 that the vision is truly fulfilled, thanks to OpenStack.
Instead of simply packaging OpenStack as a set of technologies that can run on top of Solaris, Oracle has gone a different route. The company is embedding OpenStack technologies within Solaris as the model on which the operating system is able to deliver many of its core cloud features.
For example, image management via the new Unified Archive capability in Solaris is integrated with the OpenStack Glance image management platform. The creation of virtual machines (VMs) is integrated with the OpenStack Nova compute platform, to enable users to easily spin up instances. Storage is directly integrated with the OpenStack Swift and Cinder platforms, and software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities are enabled via the OpenStack Neutron technology. Providing an interface overview to all of those capabilities is the OpenStack Horizon dashboard.
OpenStack isn’t just an overlay in Solaris; it is Solaris.
Read the full story at eWEEK:
Solaris 11.2: The Future of OpenStack?
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
