Solaris 11

Solaris 11 is here:

As we can read on Jeff Victor’s Blog (Principal Sales Consultant at Oracle Corp) these are some of the cool new features:

Software management features designed for cloud computing

The new package management system is far easier to use than previous versions of Solaris.

·       A completely new Solaris packaging system uses network-based repositories (located at our data centers or at yours) to modernize Solaris packaging.

·       A new version of Live Upgrade minimizes service downtime during package updates. It also provides the ability to simply reboot to a previous version of the software if necessary - without resorting to backup tapes.

·       The new Automated Installer replaces Solaris JumpStart and simplifies hands-off installation. AI also supports automatic creation of Solaris Zones.

·       Distro Constructor creates Solaris binary images that can be installed over the network, or copied to physical media.

·       The previous SVR4 (System V Release 4) packaging tools are included in Solaris 11 for installation of non-Solaris software packages.

·       All of this is integrated with ZFS. For example, the alternate boot environemnts (ABEs) created by the Live Upgrade tools are ZFS clones, minimizing the time to create them and the space they occupy.

Network virtualization and resource control features enable networks-in-a-box

Previewed in Solaris 11 Express, the network virtualization and resource control features in Oracle Solaris 11 enable you to create an entire network in a Solaris instance. This can include virtual switches, virtual routers, integrated firewall and load-balancing software, IP tunnels, and more.

In addition to the significant improvements in flexibility compared to a physical network, network performance typically improves. Instead of traversing multiple physical network components (NICs, cables, switches and routers), packet transfers are accomplished by in-memory loads and stores. Packet latency shrinks dramatically, and aggregate bandwidth is no longer limited by NICs, but by memory link bandwidth.

But mimicking a network wasn't enough. The Solaris 11 network resource controls provide the ability to dynamically control the amount of network bandwidth that a particular workload can use.  (Note that some of the details may have changed between the Solaris 11 Express details described in that entry, and the details of Solaris 11.)

Easy, efficient data management

Solaris 11 expands on the award-winning ZFS file system, adding encryption and de-duplication. Multiple encryption algorithms are available and can make use of encryption features included in the CPU, such as the SPARC T3 and T4 CPUs. An in-kernel CIFS server was also added, and the data is stored in a ZFS dataset. Ease-of-use is still a high-priority goal. Enabling CIFS service is as simple as enabling a dataset property.

Improved built-in computer virtualization

Along with ZFS, Oracle Solaris Zones continues to be a core feature set in use at many data centers. (The use of the word "Zones" will be preferred over the use of "Containers" to reduce confusion.) These features are enhanced in Solaris 11. I will detail these enhancements in a future blog entry, but here is a quick summary:

·       Greater flexibility for immutable zones - called "sparse-root zones" in Solaris 10. Multiple options are available in Solaris 11.

·       A zone can be an NFS server!

·       Administration of existing zones can be delegated to users in the global zone

·       Zonestat(1) reports on resource consumption of zones.

·       A P2V "pre-flight" checker verifies that a Solaris 10 or Solaris 11 system is configured correctly for migration (P2V) into a zone on Solaris 11.

·       To simplify the process of creating a zone, by default a zone gets a VNIC that is automatically configured on the most obvious physical NIC. Of course, you can manually configure a plethora of non-default network options.

Advanced protection

Long known as one of the most secure operating systems on the planet, Oracle Solaris 11 continues making advances, including:

·       CPU-speed network encryption means no compromises

·       Secure startup: by default, only the ssh service is enabled - a minimal attack surface reduces risk

·       Restricted root: by default, 'root' is a role, not a user - all actions are logged or audited by username

·       Anti-spoofing properties for data links

·       ...and more.

There are multiple reasons why this important news:

On Oracle OpenWorld 2011 several new Appliances were introduced as well:

ORACLE SPARC SUPERCLUSTER T4-4

The Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 is the world’s fastest general purpose engineered system that delivers high performance, availability, scalability and security across a wide range of enterprise applications, including database, middleware, Oracle and custom applications. The SPARC SuperCluster T4-4 solution is a completely optimized package of servers, storage and software that integrates high performance technologies including Oracle Exadata Storage Servers and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud while utilizing the newest SPARC T4-4 servers, Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance, InfiniBand I/O fabric, and Oracle Solaris 11.

Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine

Engineered System for Extreme Analytics

The industry's first in-memory BI machine that delivers the fastest performance for business intelligence and planning applications.

ORACLE DATABASE APPLIANCE

The Oracle Database Appliance saves time and money by simplifying deployment, maintenance, and support of high-availability database solutions. Built with the latest generation of the world’s most popular database—Oracle Database 11g—it offers customers a fully integrated system of software, servers, storage, and networking in a single box that delivers high-availability database services for a wide range of homegrown and packaged online transaction processing (OLTP) and data warehousing applications. All hardware and software components are supported by a single vendor—Oracle—and offers customers unique pay-as-you-grow software licensing to quickly scale from 2 processor cores to 24 processor cores without incurring the costs and downtime usually associated with hardware upgrades.

Big Data for the Enterprise

With the recent introduction of Oracle Big Data Appliance, Oracle is the first vendor to offer a

complete and integrated solution to address the full spectrum of enterprise big data requirements.

Oracle’s big data strategy is centered on the idea that you can evolve your current enterprise data

architecture to incorporate big data and deliver business value. By evolving your current

enterprise architecture, you can leverage the proven reliability, flexibility and performance of your

Oracle systems to address your big data requirements.

Defining Big Data

Big data typically refers to the following types of data:

• Traditional enterprise data – includes customer information from CRM systems,

transactional ERP data, web store transactions, general ledger data.

• Machine-generated /sensor data – includes Call Detail Records (“CDR”), weblogs,

smart meters, manufacturing sensors, equipment logs (often referred to as digital

exhaust), trading systems data.

• Social data – includes customer feedback streams, micro-blogging sites like Twitter,

social media platforms like Facebook

The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that data volume is growing 40% per year, and will

grow 44x between 2009 and 2020. But while it’s often the most visible parameter, volume of data

is not the only characteristic that matters. In fact, there are four key characteristics that define big

data:

Divided solution spectrum

Many new technologies have emerged to address the IT infrastructure requirements outlined

above. At last count, there were over 120 open source key-value databases for acquiring and

storing big data, with Hadoop emerging as the primary system for organizing big data and

relational databases expanding their reach into less structured data sets to analyze big data. These

new systems have created a divided solutions spectrum comprised of:

• Not Only SQL (NoSQL) solutions: developer-centric specialized systems

• SQL solutions: the world typically equated with the manageability, security and trusted

nature of relational database management systems (RDBMS)

NoSQL systems are designed to capture all data without categorizing and parsing it upon entry

into the system, and therefore the data is highly varied. SQL systems, on the other hand, typically

place data in well-defined structures and impose metadata on the data captured to ensure consistency and validate data types.

Oracle’s Big Data Solutions

Oracle’s big data strategy is centered on the idea that you can

evolve your current enterprise data architecture to incorporate big data and deliver business

value, leveraging the proven reliability, flexibility and performance of your Oracle systems to

address your big Oracle data requirements.

Oracle Big Data Appliance

The Oracle Big Data Appliance is an engineered system that combines optimized hardware with the most comprehensive software stack featuring specialized solutions developed by Oracle to deliver

a complete, easy-to-deploy solution for acquiring, organizing and loading big data into Oracle Database 11g. It is designed to deliver extreme analytics on all data types, with enterprise-class performance, availability, supportability and security. It is also tightly integrated with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Database, so you can analyze all your data together with extreme performance.

The figure below shows how Oracle Big Data Appliance fits within the entire ecosystem of Oracle engineered systems for big data. Oracle Big Data Appliance addresses the data acquisition and organization requirements for data stored in NoSQL solutions.

High-level overview of Big Data Appliance Software

The Oracle Big Data Appliance also includes an open source distribution of Apache Hadoop,

including HDFS and other components, an open source distribution of the statistical package R for analysis of unfiltered data on Oracle Data Appliance, and Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.6

operating system.

Oracle Big Data Appliance

New I Integrated

The figure below shows three Big Data Appliances streaming data from

sensors and social media, acquiring this data, organizing it and leveraging Oracle Exadata for data analysis.