Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Solaris 11 release and webcast

Solaris 11 will be release 2011/11/09 (2011/11/11 was not optimal for some reason).

Oracle will host a launch event in New York and you can register to attend to the live webcast.

Even if I have abandoned Solaris 11 for OpenIndiana for storage related installations, Solaris 11 have it's obvious place on bigger iron in the datacenter or for any mission critical workload that needs enterprise support. I would gladly have continued to use Solaris 11 for storage but the change made by Oracle to ditch the community and move to closed source and stricter licensing prevents that.

This will make fantastic features such as crossbow, IPS, Native CIFS and COMSTAR available for use in production environments. Many enhancements for zones have also been made, they can for example be NFS servers in Solaris 11.

Also if you want to make the most use of the new SPARC T4, Solaris 11 is the best choice since not every change usable to the T4 have been ported back to Solaris 10 8/11.

If you pay for support of Solaris 11, please demand that Oracle gives you access to the source, DTrace will loose it's value otherwise and I think Oracle needs to hear that.

Oracle Solaris 11 Launch webcast

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If it's no trouble, could you briefly list the storage reasons that you prefer OpenIndiana? Is this strictly about ZFS enhancements, or are there other reasons as well? Thanks.

Henkis said...

I am a happy FishWork (ZFSSA) user and will deploy Solaris 11 with ZFS in enterprise environments, but I think ZFS adaptation would have been better with a different license and a less closed source/information.

I prefer OpenIndiana over Solaris 11 for smaller companies, hobbyist and for home storage. I would love use some of the ZFS features only available in Solaris 11 everywhere but the lack of lack of bug information, source, future plans combined with $1000/year/host fee to be ably to run it at all besides testing makes it less attractive for some users.

I'm also a bit uncertain where Oracles ZFS implementation is heading with the lack of information and the fact that most key ZFS developers have left Oracle (Jeff, Bill, Matt, George, Bryan…) before ZFS could be considered feature complete. Some of them are now working with the illumos ZFS implementation that is used in OpenIndiana.