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.
Thank you for the info. It sounds pretty user friendly. I guess I’ll pick one up for fun. thank u
ReplyDeleteCMMI Consulting India
Nice blog! I take this blog seriously, its about Oracle.
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