Oracle upgrades Solaris 10 OS environment

Oracle has released its Solaris 10 updates for the operating system (OS), clustering software and the developers kit.

Solaris 10 9/10 contains new fixes, features and hardware support. The OS also has enhancements for the latest versions of x86 processors and Oracle's Sparc chips, allowing it to take advantage of large memory and multicore processor systems.

The update is supplied as an easily installed package, the company claimed, and preserved full compatibility with more than 11,000 third-party products and customer applications currently in use.

"Oracle Solaris is now developed, tested and supported as an integrated component of Oracle's applications-to-disk technology stack, which includes continuous major platform testing, in addition to the Oracle Certification Environment, representing over 50,000 test use cases for every Oracle Solaris patch and platform released," the company said.

Further additions and improvements included networking and database optimisations for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), enhanced physical to virtual (P2V) capabilities to allow seamless movement from existing Solaris 10 physical systems to virtual Oracle Solaris Containers, and increased reliability for virtualised Solaris Logical Domain instances when deployed using Oracle VM for Sparc.

In the storage arena, Solaris ZFS online device management allows file system configurations to be changed without having to take the data offline. There are also tools to aid in recovering from problems related to unplanned system downtime.

Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3 offers enterprise high availability and disaster recovery features. It also integrates with WebLogic Server, Oracle's Siebel CRM, MySQL Cluster and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g for consolidation in virtualised environments. There is also connectivity support for InfiniBand on public networks and for storage systems.

The development toolkit, Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2, has been designed for the development of single, multithreaded and distributed applications. It provides high-performance C, C++ and Fortran compilers for Solaris, along with advanced multicore tools for parallel-thread performance analysis.