Oracle Previews Solaris 11

As part of an effort to maintain customer commitment to its derivative of the venerable UNIX operating system, Oracle today said that it plans to deliver a version 11 of its Solaris operating system in 2011.

That new offering will serve as the foundation for a series of operating system updates that will ultimately make transaction processing applications running on a Solaris operating system 40 times faster than they are today. That goal will be accomplished in part by leveraging next-generation Sparc processors that will scale to 128 cores by 2015. Those processors will be able to support as many as 16,384 threads, compared to a maximum of 512 today.

According to John Fowler, executive vice president of systems at Oracle, the goal is to double application performance on Sparc systems every other year as more and more application code get executed directly in memory.

While most of Oracle’s focus today was on Solaris and Sparc, Fowler also said that Oracle remains committed to Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) on Intel-class processors. OEL is a derivative of the Red Hat distribution of Linux that has been integrated with management tools developed by Oracle.

In addition, Fowler said Oracle is committed to Oracle VM, which will allow IT organizations to run Windows, OEL and other Linux distributions on top of Sparc processors.

While the preview of Solaris 11 lacked any specific details of the new operating system, Fowler stressed that Oracle is committed to creating an open environment on top of Solaris that will run applications from any application vendor.