#solaris #solaris114beta

There is a new update coming to Oracle® Solaris® 11 that carries with it a great deal of security additions and enhancements.
I’ll post some of them in the coming days but I first wanted to provide my thoughts on Solaris.

Obviously Solaris is a very robust, secure, mature operating environment. Even with recent announcements relating to Solaris and SPARC®.

Note that Extended Support for Solaris 11 ends November 2034 and Sustaining Support is marked as indefinite. So, let’s put to rest the idea that Oracle is no longer supporting their premier Unix Operating Environment.  Was there restructuring? – Yes, was there an abandonment of Oracle Solaris, no, and the totality of the new features that we will covering in the coming days bears strong witness to that.

In my opinion, if you are currently running Solaris there is no immediate, urgent need to look at spending time, money, and effort to migrate away from it. When paired with the SPARC processor is a secure, fast platform engineered for large-scale enterprise deployment. It provides compliance monitoring, performance monitoring, and ZERO overhead virtualization.

I have some difficulty biting my lower lip when I hear “technologists” speak of the gloom and doom of the “M” series processor and/or SPARC given Oracle’s announcements relating to it.

Oracle JUST released the M8 in July of 2017.  The chip isn’t even a year old.  As I understand it (please realize that I do not speak for Oracle and make no guarantees about product availability) Oracle plans to continue to invest in producing robust SPARC based servers with improvements to I/O, Memory, etc. The M8 remains the constant but servers will continue to be designed with new technologies.

How can one easily overlook the M8? Clocked to 5Ghz, 32KB L1 instruction cache, 16KB L1 data cache, 256KB L2 instruction cache, 128KB L2 data cache, 64 MB of shared L3 cache, the ability to issue 4 instructions at a time, 32 Cores, 16GB memory pages, security and database acceleration hardware on the die itself.

Modern applications use many threads working on large shared-memory segments. Bugs or pointer problems in these applications can cause highly unpredictable behavior and consume excessive amounts of an application developer’s time to troubleshoot and diagnose. Silent data corruption and buffer overruns are two of these difficult-to-diagnose problems. For both problems, Silicon Secured Memory dramatically reduces the time it takes for application developers to troubleshoot memory reference bugs. For silent data corruption, Silicon Secured Memory can facilitate immediate action to be taken by the application, preventing costly recovery efforts.

A robust CPU and an enterprise ready OS!  As I stated above, there is no reason to look to move away from SPARC/SOLARIS in the near future.

In the coming days I’ll post a bit about.

• Key Features in Oracle Solaris 11.4

• Security and Compliance Features

• Data Management Features

• Networking Features

• Performance and Observability

• Virtualization Features

• System Management Features

• Installation and Software Management Features

• Enhancements for Developers