Why Oracle Wants Solaris

With its future apparently secure, the benefits of Sun's operating system become compelling. Oracle praised the Solaris operating system when it agreed to acquire its creator, Sun Microsystems, but the actual beauty of this fine piece of engineering was left unexplained. Here's a look at the advantages of Solaris for business computing and insights into what Oracle's long-term intentions may be for the operating system.

No matter what your attitude is toward Oracle's products, management style and strategy, anyone running a large or small data center should breathe a sigh of relief now that the long-term viability of Solaris is assured. Without an acquisition by Oracle or Cisco ( CSCO - news - people ), Solaris might have been put on the proverbial shelf, a tribute to what the fine engineers at Sun could do back in the day. But now that Solaris will receive the marketing support that it deserves, information technology staff should be taking a close look at the operating system for the following reasons.

Superior virtualization: In the Linux world, virtualization is performed by multiple parties. One organization or company does the hypervisor (Xen, VMware ( VMW - news - people ), Citrix, Parallels), the virtual layer on top of the hardware. Another organization (the Linux community) adapts the operating system to better support virtualization. What Solaris offers IT is a top-to-bottom engineered approach to virtualization where the hardware, the hypervisor, the OS and the ZFS file system are all designed to deliver optimal performance and manageability. Solaris Containers are a lightweight but powerful virtualization option with very low processing overhead (2% vs. about 20% for a hypervisor). Linux will get there but at a slower pace as the multiple parties involved negotiate with each other. Microsoft ( MSFT - news - people ) also offers a unified virtualization stack but it remains to be seen if Windows can ever achieve as wide adoption in the server space.
Scalability for Large Scale Multiprocessing: Benchmarks shows that Linux stops providing benefits at four processors. You can add more, but performance won't get much better. Solaris has been engineered to support massive multiprocessing. If you need to scale a single box, you can add dozens of processors, and Solaris boosts performance accordingly. Solaris also has the most scalable networking support of any operating system on the market.

Reliability: Linux has long been successful in data centers because it is less error prone than Windows, which frequently requires machines to be rebooted. Solaris takes reliability to a new level. A feature called predictive self-healing allows failed hardware components to be swapped out without rebooting.

Security: The security in Solaris benefits from the same engineering quality as the rest of the operating system. Sun's security DNA comes from its experience supporting financial services computing and e-commerce. Solaris was designed for secure networking and provides many security features, including role-based access control, a firewall and secure out-of-the-box settings.

Administration: Solaris has administration functions that allow mass changes to be made to many instances of an operating system at once and features that allow one master machine to be replicated to many other machines running a copy of the operating system. The administration capabilities have been expanded to cover the challenges of running a large number of virtual machines.

Flexible Deployment: Solaris is offered both as a fully supported commercial product and as OpenSolaris, a leading-edge open source version where the latest features are tested. Solaris 10 can run Solaris 8 and 9 apps in containers. Further, Solaris runs on a huge range of hardware from x86 Intel platforms to high-end RISC servers. Solaris can run on any hardware platform, not just on Sun hardware.

Green IT: As they say at Sun, "You can't be green without the Sun." While that may not be always true, it is true that Sun's SPARC chip set and its servers are among the most energy efficient on the market, in some cases qualifying for utility rebates. Performing a server consolidation using Solaris and Sun hardware provides an easy way to lower carbon footprint but maintain high performance.

With Sun at the helm, you could easily get the idea that Solaris was created as a public service. Sun has never seemed like it was in business solely for the money. At Oracle, green is always a top priority, as it should be, and Larry Ellison is swooning about Solaris because he sees it as key to a new kind of offer to Oracle's customers. But what is that offer?

My guess is that the "Industry in a Box" vision mentioned by Charles Phillips, Oracle's co-president, will actually become the next wave of cloud computing. In a previous column, I recommended that Google ( GOOG - news - people ) get into the appliance business. My guess is Oracle will follow this path with a vengeance. Solaris will power Oracle's cloud offerings, but through appliances, Oracle will bring the cloud to the data center.

Remember that Google, the leading provider of large-scale computing services in the cloud, does so by building its own hardware and software that is integrated and optimized for the task. I believe that Oracle recognizes that there are limits to the amount of enterprise IT that can be put into the cloud. Problems such as security, disaster recovery and moving huge amounts of data are significant barriers to cloud migration. But many of the same economic and operational benefits of the cloud can be achieved through remotely managed appliances that integrate software and hardware in one box. Oracle can run these over the Net using the Smart Services model I wrote about in Mesh Collaboration. The customer gets all the benefits of the cloud without having to move data off premise.

With the acquisition in place, the installed base of Solaris will grow as more companies discover the brightly shining benefits of this operating system.

Author: Dan Woods

Dan Woods is chief technology officer and editor of Evolved Technologist, a research firm focused on the needs of CTOs and chief information officers. He also consults for many of the companies he writes about. For more information, go to www.evolvedtechnologist.com.

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