Oracle Unveils Solaris with Built-in OpenStack: "A Modern Cloud OS"

When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, there was a lot of speculation about which Sun products and projects would continue and which would fall by the wayside. Solaris was among the products that many people felt wouldn't have a bright future. On Tuesday, though, Oracle unveiled Solaris 11.2, which is only the second point release of Solaris since version 11 appeared in 2011.

And, Oracle is positioning Solaris as "a modern cloud platform that melds efficient virtualization, application-driven software-defined networking (SDN) technology and a full OpenStack distribution."

At the end of last year, Oracle joined many other companies as a sponsor of OpenStack, and with the new release of Solaris building in a full OpenStack distribution, it's clear that we'll need to factor Oracle's OpenStack plans in with Red Hat's, Rackspace's and others.

"Oracle's relentless innovation offers customers the strongest cloud product portfolio in the industry. By engineering the OS, the virtualization, SDN and OpenStack together, Oracle Solaris 11.2 provides a complete cloud solution," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle, in a statement. "It's a complete platform for simple, efficient, secure, compliant and open enterprise cloud deployments that can help customers accelerate their businesses and capitalize on the potential of cloud computing while reducing cost."

"Cloud computing is creating an entirely new set of expectations for enterprise-class infrastructure software," said Al Gillen, Program VP, Servers and System Software, IDC, in a statement. "Where once offering the piece parts -- the OS, virtualization and networking -- was a sufficient starting point, having an integrated solution is becoming more of the expectation for enterprise customers looking to build a private cloud."

No doubt, as Oracle pitches its integrated solution and OpenStack platform to enterprises, it will emphasize its experience in supporting enterprise customers. That's taking a page from Red Hat's playbook, and there are existing Oracle customers who may favor the database giant over competitors.

For more on the new features in Solaris 11.2, you can get the formal release notes. And, you can now download the OS as a beta.