Oracle Solaris 11 Express Released

comay writes "Today Oracle released Solaris 11 Express 2010.11. It includes a large number of new features (PDF) not found in either Oracle Solaris 10 or previous OpenSolaris releases, including ZFS encryption and deduplication, network-based packaging and provisioning systems, network virtualization, optimized I/O for NUMA platforms and optimized platform support including support for Intel's latest Nehalem and SPARC T3. In addition, Oracle Solaris 10 support is available from within a container/zone so migration of existing systems is greatly simplified." Reader gtirloni adds, "Oracle also announced that this is not a beta or preview, but a full, supported release aimed at everybody developing, testing, prototyping or demonstrating applications running on the latest Solaris release (not allowed to be used in production)."

Re:Wait, what?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Yeah, people [slashdot.org] who use the word "evil" when talking about software and related companies [google.com] are clearly ignorant incompetent morons with no idea what they are talking about. I also totally agree with you that "good" and "evil" are meaningless adjectives, that are only included in the dictionary because the companies creating dictionaries specialize in the "abuse" of the English language. Did you know that Google doesn't turn up any results showing "Oppression" as an adjective! So much for their "Do No Evil" slogan!

Re:Full, Supported Release -- That we can't use

[segedunum]

They're just giving away the development tools for free. So when/if developers use them, and end users like the result, they've got you by the short and curlies. It's a time honoured tradition, often rightly or wrongly compared to a drug dealer's "the first hit is free, kid".

Given that Solaris usage has been declining for ten years now, Oracle is pushing Solaris back into an ever higher end niche as a response and those using free development tools have Unix-like alternatives they can use for any purpose it's a bit optimistic to think they have anyone by the short and curlies. You can have as many hits as you like from other dealers and many would consider that what Oracle is selling is sherbet. I just can't see where Solaris is going now where it hasn't already been or tried to be.

Sparc T3? Interesting...

[blind biker]

I lost touch with Sun microprocessor development since I left my life as an IT/Unix specialist behind me, a couple of years ago. I am pleasantly surprised to learn that Sun engineers have been working at it, though, and have produced a rather intriguing architecture with 16 cores and 8 HW threads per core. That's pretty fucking impressive, methinks, especially since it seems to integrate two 1/10 GB ethernet controllers on die, and the 4 DDR3 channels are not bad to have, either. Anyhow, I think this is the most exciting CPU, for me, of recent years.

Solaris future is Oracle's 300,000 customers

[Bryan-10021]

Oracle has over 300,000 customers of it's products. Sun had 30,000. I think the future looks bright for commercial Solaris. At the end of the day someone has to pay for the R&D that leads to innovation and Oracle knows how to sell software and make money. It's called capitalism and it's what pays everyone's salaries. And it's because of this that we will see more innovations like ZFS and DTrace.

This is a good thing as competition always benefits everyone including open source.