In 2009, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun Microsystems hardware and software: Solaris operating system, MySQL database, Java programming language, and SPARC hardware - servers and storage systems. The Oracle Corporation's stated strategy is to become an end-to-end service provider for corporate and public sector clients. Oracle has been emphasizing that its software will simplify the development, management, and monitoring of service oriented architecture while delivering performance and scalability. In conjunction with additional acquisitions, Coherence Tangosol software is being used to provide value-based application performance to distributed and frequently accessed data. Tangosol Data Grid is an enabler for the use of XPT: Extreme Transaction Processing in financial services, telecommunications, travel, and logistics industries. Sun Microsystems developed and positioned Solaris-UNIX as a base operating system platform and front end for scalable databases, web servers, middleware, and virtual machines to compete with IBM mainframe operating systems - z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM. In terms of reliability and service, Solaris is highly rated.

Oracle Corporation has extended the featureset and made enhancements to the Solaris 11 operating system to support virtualization, isolation of workloads, and network virtualization for provisioning VM: virtual machine deployment. The secure-by-default features for startup, role-based root access, phone-home automatic reporting and auditing have been implemented to support recurring cloud deployments. The Solaris 11 release is integrated in the Oracle software environment: 1- Java programming language 2- Oracle VM 3- Oracle applications 4- Oracle WebLogic 5- Oracle Fusion middleware 6- Oracle Database 11g products.

Solaris 11 runs on Dell and other x86 hardware. However, Oracle Corporation provides advantages and performance improvements with running Solaris on its SPARC hardware.

Solaris is a component in the Oracle Corporation SOA: service oriented architecture strategy and development platform roadmap. Solaris Cluster extends Solaris virtualization technologies and provides support for Oracle applications and databases. In addition to managing resources such as load balancing and global virtual IP addresses, security and networking capabilities have been improved in deploying active applications through Solaris Cluster scalable data services. The system and volume management choices are included with replication modules.

Oracle Solaris 11 - Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is central to the Oracle Corporation strategy for delivering expanded services and software offerings to its clients: public, private, and hybrid clouds. Oracle hardware and software infrastructure provides scalability, data addressing, storage subsystems, and performance. Management tools deploy and provision systems and services to meet elastic requirements.

Oracle Solaris 11 supports and enables software, infrastructure, and platform as a service.

SaaS: Software as a Service is a consumer-facing cloud computing system which provides websites that deliver bi-directional services and digital content.

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service virtualizes a server into the cloud. The operating environment is moved into the cloud: operating system, database software, applications and data. Access is through Internet connectivity.

PaaS: Platform as a Service is the operating system or database is built to run directly in a cloud environment.

This cloud strategy brings challenges and risks: applications need to scale for handling orders of magnitude, the inability to manage peak activity means a loss of service and revenue, and dislocation to customers, and security must be built in at each level to ensure that applications and services run with integrity and safely.

Solaris Operating System Design

Oracle Hardware and Software Stack

IBM Corporation's acquisition of Red Hat Linux has changed many of the assumptions with regard to maintaining the Oracle Solaris operating system and transitioning to Red Hat Linux. CETi staff and technology partner are evaluating the revised strategy.

The Oracle Solaris cloud deployments are implemented using default features for startup, role-based root access, automatic reporting, and auditing. Oracle Solaris 11 integrates Oracle Solaris Zones, dynamic resource management, and network bandwidth control. Computing resources can be divided into multiple environments that can be provisioned and migrated. As cloud deployments scale, the assumption is that Oracle customers will repeatedly deploy multiple VMs.

The Solaris operating system provides virtualization for an elastic cloud infrastructure which can expand and contract on demand while providing services. Software Installation and Deployment tools controls file access and protects system resources with integrated, multilevel security through immutable zones, data link protection, role-based administration, and hardware-accelerated encryption for on-disk and network data. Cloud applications and services are deployed, configured, and updated with the AI: Automated Installer and IP: Image Packaging System controls updates. This provides high-availability. Security is implemented through application stack Intelligent zone migration and remote and local clustering keep applications running even in the event of a hardware failure.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center provides visibility - monitoring and usage into cloud computing resource availability and the ability to track services consumption and expense. It is used to manage the hardware and software stack: firmware, operating systems, virtual machines, servers, storage, and networking components.

The Solaris operating system uses the ZFS file system for storing up to 256 quadrillion ZB: Zetabytes without media limits. The file system space automatically is allocated across storage devices. The advantages with the ZFS file system include: 1- root and boot environments 2- integrated volume management 3- built-in compression 4- data integrity with copy-on-write and RAID-Z 5- Tiered storage with Flash. 6- Snapshot, clone, and rollback for backup, restore, and migration.

Oracle SPARC / Solaris - Changes in the Market

The consensus is that Oracle Corporation will be evaluating UNIX-Solaris and its investment in the Oracle-Sun Microsystems hardware platform in relation to the broad industry support for specialized utilization of Linux-variants and its own cloud and mobile computing strategies. Oracle has been investing in both UNIX-Solaris and Linux operating systems. By contributing to and supporting the open source Linux operating system base code, Oracle Corporation is positioning its hardware architecture to meet emerging and new client computing requirements in multiple ways. The capability to migrate from Solaris to Linux or have both operating systems coexist on a hardware platform removes issues associated with endianness and provides an economic incentive both to continue licensing the Oracle database and develop applications with Oracle software. Failure to account for a varying endianness across architectures when writing code for mixed platforms leads to failures and bugs that can be difficult to detect. A big-endian machine stores the most significant byte first; a little-endian machine stores the least significant byte first. In these standard forms, the bytes remain ordered by significance. Mixed-endian and middle-endian forms also are possible where the ordering of bytes within a 16-bit word can be different from the ordering of 16-bit words within a 32-bit word. Endianness is important as a low-level attribute of a particular data format. The order in which the two bytes of a UCS-2 character are stored in memory is of considerable importance in network programming where two computers with different byte orders may be communicating with each other.

In the late third quarter of 2017, Oracle Corporation laid off a high percentage of its Solaris employees. This was the second termination of hardware staff and Solaris engineering support personnel. Oracle has changed its release roadmap for Solaris; removing Solaris 12 and added only a "Solaris 11.next" with security patches and upgrades. The decline of both the Solaris operating system and SPARC servers began under Sun Microsystems. Significant funding was spent on research and development for product improvement. However, data center operators opted for less expensive commodity hardware in combination with open source free-to-use Linux-variant operating systems. When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems hardware and software, infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service clouds were compelling bottom line cost reasons for transitioning workloads to third parties such as Amazon Web Services with computing use on demand. Most cloud providers were not buying off-the-shelf servers such as SPARC for their own data centers; they either had them built to custom specifications. This further contributed to sales problems for SPARC and UNIX-Solaris; despite both having been highly rated for reliability and performance. Oracle had promised to provide support until 2034. Before Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle Corporation, it had released much of the Solaris operating system's code under an open source license as OpenSolaris. Although OpenSolaris terminated by Oracle; it was forked and released as OpenIndiana.

Several leading hardware and software companies have based their information technology operations on Linux and open source software. Accordingly, Oracle Corporation has been transitioning software to work on Linux-variant operating systems in order to adjust its strategy and respond to competition in the market.

Oracle Solaris and Red Hat Linux Enterprise - Commentary

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is open source software designed for large data centers and virtualization. It is acknowledged to be a stable platform for enterprise applications. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a typical implementation would be either a Fedora Core or CentOS deployment. Each version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is supported for up to 10 years. Oracle Corporation - Solaris 11 contains a number of significant changes, including an installer that replaces JumpStart, new packaging, and a requirement to use the ZFS: Zetabye file system for root. Since the changes in Solaris 11 impact system management functionality, the impact on operational procedures can be substantial. The evaluation of Solaris 11 is a convenient juncture for evaluating whether to upgrade Solaris or consider an alternative operating system. ¹

The Oracle business model is based on licenses, support, and maintenance agreements. For enterprises currently utilizing Oracle SPARC hardware and the Solaris operating system, there are reasons to consider migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Oracle’s integrated hardware and software provide the greatest benefit when running Oracle software products and the requirement is to have a single point of purchase and support. However, Oracle customers in the past have expressed issues relating to indiscriminate cost increases and possible limitations on deployment options. There continues to be a wariness not to be locked into a single vendor and the Oracle roadmap. With open source software, organizational enterprise retains the ability to control software licensing costs by combining commercial distributions with an affiliated non-commercial software distribution.

The selection of an operating system for an information technology infrastructure has long-term implications. The selection process must take into account not only the featureset of the current operating system, but the ability for the operating system to enable and support business requirements. Reduced total cost of ownership, flexibility, scalability, and uncertainty regarding Oracle Corporation’s long term commitment to the SPARC architecture and the Solaris operating system are all reasons for migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.