Last week, we announced the upcoming release of Solaris 11.2. Even if this is a minor release, it contains major features that enable strong benefits for IT operations toward Business requirements that I am hearing everyday:"time-to-market", pay for what you use, security, simplified operations. Yes, OS are not a commodity and are a corner piece bringing either a lot's of value or a lot's of pain (depending on which one you rely on). At Oracle we are putting a large part of our R&D effort to hide the complexity and bring strong value through Solaris toward your infrastructure and applications management: Solaris acting as the glue between your hardware execution layer and your applications.
Time-to-market: Centralized Cloud Management, Fast and Agile Application Provisioning
Cloud brings a lot's of promise and as such all Businesses are strongly looking at Clouds optimization, targeting "Time-to-market" (agility) and pay for what you use.
Source: TwinStrata
On the other side, either for the Cloud Service Providers or your internal IT operations, there is a lot's of work to do to make it happen in a standard, repeatable, secured and scalable model. To achieve this, one emerging standard embrace by the major IT players, including Oracle, is OpenStack. Still, discussing with many System Integrators who are starting to leverage it, OpenStack requires a lot's of work to make it right and maintain it, as it is in an constant evolution path. What we did in Solaris 11.2, was to benefit from strong proven features already in place, to build the foundation of the OpenStack framework, and get it ready and engineered to be delivered quickly and reliably.
This is a key milestone to provide Cloud Service Providers and internal IT the foundation layer required to achieve the expected "Time-to-Market" of your Cloud infrastructure. The nice thing about it, is that it is not only the management point of your Solaris environments, but of all your OpenStack compliant systems.
Pay for what you use: Independent and Isolated Environments... compliant with licensing boundaries
The next step once the service is deployed is to provide the required boundaries to "pay for what you use", not only from a pure hardware perspective, but also from a software licensing model. We already benefit from this capability, since Solaris 10, with the Solaris Zones virtualization technology. In Solaris 11.2, this has been enhanced to simplify the allocation of resources at cpus, cores and sockets level, matching your software licenses requirements.
Security: Reduce Risk with Comprehensive Compliance Checking and Reporting
In a Cloud environment, where resources are shared, you need to insure very strong security mechanism between tenants. Thanks to built-in security, inside Solaris, we were already able to provide those mechanisms. In Solaris 11.2, we bring it a step further, being able to provide compliance checking and reporting of the configuration, like PCI/DSS required in Card Banking industry.
This provide to Cloud Providers and Cloud Consumers a reliable, secured platform to build upon, simplifying complex configurations and associated audits processes.
Simplified operation: Enhancing OpenStack with Live Reconfiguration
Once you get your application on time, paying for what you use in a secured environment, you may think you are done. Are you ? Of course not ! What about application upgrade, platform patching, all the life cycle management of both your application and the Cloud platform you are relying on ? This is a well known challenge of consolidation projects, where the more tenants you put on a platform, the more complex is it to find a proper maintenance windows.
At the Solaris 11.2 platform level, you can now :
- dynamically reconfigure Oracle Solaris Zones without requiring a reboot, helping to eliminate system downtime,
- manage Solaris Zones patching independently, helping you apply your system and/or applications patches at your own pace
To go further in understanding the multiple values Solaris 11.2 platform can bring to your Business, I invite you to join us in Paris, on May 22nd, for a Solaris Tech Day. You will have the opportunity to exchange with Chris Arms, VP of Engineering, ISVs and customers using it today.
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