Top 10 Storage and Networking Trends for 2014
Although the Solaris operating system may not be as dominant as it once was following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle in 2010, from a technology perspective, Solaris is still one of the most advanced platforms in the enterprise.
Today Oracle extended the capabilities of that platform with the release of Oracle Solaris 11.2, which adds support for software-defined networking, OpenStack and an integrated hypervisor.
Markus Flierl, vice president of software development for Oracle, says that Solaris makes a better option for building cloud environments in particular because it is substantially less costly to manage application workloads on Solaris than any other platform. As a result, Flierl contends that because OpenStack and SDN technologies are now tightly coupled within the Solaris environment, it is now much simpler to, for example, deploy OpenStack on Solaris than any other platform. The end result, says Flierl, is a much better ratio of administrator-to-workloads managed than with any other platform.
With the general rise of the software-defined enterprise and the cloud, Flierl says IT organizations that now have to manage workloads at an unprecedented level of scale are looking for operating system environments that can rise to meet those requirements.
Ever since Oracle acquired Sun, the company has been making the case for tighter integration between application software and the underlying infrastructure. What’s changing now is that rather than being obsessed with the cost of acquiring new systems, more IT organizations in the age of the cloud have a greater appreciation for the cost of managing them.
