Oracle® Solaris 11.4

Monday, 22 January, 2018 15:33 Written by Brian B

#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

2 Comments

Speaking at Oracle OpenWorld 2017

Wednesday, 13 September, 2017 20:05 Written by Brian B

If you are going to Oracle OpenWorld 2017 please stop by for my presentations.

Step to the Cloud: Ensuring Connectivity to the Cloud
Monday, Oct 02, 12:15 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. | Marriott Marquis (Yerba Buena Level) – Salon 13
In this session learn what to consider when migrating to the cloud. Topics include software-defined wide area networking, Oracle’s Anycast solution, Oracle’s acquisition of Dyn, how hosting client hardware within Equinix data centers improves performance and availability to Oracle’s cloud solution, and data security solutions. The session closes with a positive comparison of hosting on Oracle’s cloud machine when situations warrant.
State of the Art Cloud Platform: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Code: CON1172
Session Type: Conference Session

SAS on Oracle Cloud: Technical Implementation with Docker Containers
Wednesday, Oct 04, 10:45 a.m. – 11:30 a.m. | Moscone West – Room 2003
Selected as the partner for Oracle/SAS/Arrow to implement, provision, and provide professional services. In this session learn about the features of the solution and why using a Docker container in the Oracle Cloud to run SAS analytics makes both business and technical sense. Hear a summary of the integrated, optimized, turn-key cloud environment, and review the architecture. Attendees also see a demo of deploying the container and using the solution running in the container. Discover how easy it is to build once and run many times, as well as how easily IT departments can save both time and expense with container technology.
State of the Art Cloud Platform: Application Development
Code: CON7548
Session Type: Conference Session

0 Comments

Oracle Database backup to Oracle Cloud

Sunday, 23 April, 2017 10:09 Written by Brian B

Below is a webinar that demonstrates the ease at which one can create an Oracle cloud account, and then backup are restore a local Oracle database to it.

We created this using an Oracle Database Appliance as the source, any Oracle database instance can be used, it isn’t ODA specific.

There is an associated lab guide, reach out to info@collier-it.com and I’ll send you a copy via email.

0 Comments

Oracle ACE – for Systems Technologies

Friday, 06 February, 2015 12:33 Written by Brian B

I’ve been honored with the designation of Oracle ACE for Systems Technologies.

Rick Ramsey @OTN_Garage OTN Garage Blog and I have been working to add a USA based Solaris/Systems Technologies ACE for close to two years. My most sincere thanks and appreciation to him for working with me and to my sponsors within Oracle for their recommendation.

My Profile can be viewed here and Ricks blog post can be viewed here.

The entry to this prestigious group is challenging. My application was declined twice. This is about technologists that freely give back to the community. Blogs, Social Media (I’m @snatchbrain), Authoring Technical Articles, Public Presentations, Industry Certifications, and networking are but some of the entry points that are evaluated by the program to gain admittance.

I have two personal challenges, the first is to assist anyone that would like to see what this program is about and to assist those interested in attaining the designation, and the second, is to continue to evangelize the technologies and work towards the designation of Ace Director.

If you are interested, please reach out to me and let me know. I want to help those that have an interest.

So, Collier IT has two ACE designated employees, myself, and Seth Miller. We look to growing that number both internal and external.

Twitter:
@snatchbrain
@Seth_M_Miller
@oracleace
@otn_garage