Oracle Solaris is the best platform for the cloud because it combines key computing elements - operating system, virtualization, networking, storage management, and user environment - into a stable, secure, mission-critical foundation that customers can depend on. Learn more about Engineered for Oracle.

Oracle SPARC T4 Processor

The new Oracle SPARC T4 processor delivers excellent performance for both throughput computing and single-threaded workloads. To boost single-threaded application performance, a thread can be defined as critical, such that an entire core can become available to run the thread as fast as possible without competing with other, less critical threads. This dynamic allocation of hardware resources to provide boosts in performance is supported in Oracle Solaris 11 with a Critical Threads API. The operating system recognizes critical threads in applications and guarantees exclusive access to hardware reources by setting an appropriate priority.

Oracle Solaris 11 takes advantage of the Oracle SPARC T4 crypto co-processor providing hardware accelerated encryption and decryption through the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework. With support for many well-known algorithms, Oracle Solaris 11 provides significant performance gains for various cipher and hash instructions and other cryptographic protocols such as SSL.

The Oracle SPARC T4 processor was the first SPARC based processor to introduce a 4MB L3 cache shared between all cores. Oracle Solaris 11 adds support for this L3 cache in its Fault Management Architecture (FMA), providing fault tolerance allowing it to retire individual cache lines in the event of a failure, ensuring all cores can continue to operate without interruption or data corruption.

As enterprises push for better returns through higher consolidation ratios, software emulated I/O is rapidly becoming a limiting factor for virtualization. The demand to virtualize I/O intensive applications such as database and compute-intensive applications requires an I/O architecture that can deliver near native performance, increased throughput and flexibility. Oracle Solaris 11 supports single-root I/O virtualization on Oracle SPARC T4 based systems, providing virtual environments with direct access to I/O device from the operating system without having to go through the control domain. More information here.

Oracle Solaris Studio

Oracle Solaris Studio compilers and tools, with Oracle Solaris 11, allow developers to maximize application performance on the newest SPARC and x86 systems. The optimizing compilers in Oracle Solaris Studio 12.3 allow software applications to take full advantage of both single thread and throughput performance using new instructions as well as processor-specific code generation which thrive on the instruction-level parallelism that the SPARC T4 provides. In addition, Oracle Solaris Studio software 12.3 comes with tuned math and algebraic libraries as well as performance observability tools which allow developers to achieve the best performance on both SPARC- and x86-based Oracle Solaris 11 systems.

Oracle Database

The Oracle Database takes advantage of the Oracle Solaris Cryptographic Framework and the Oracle SPARC T4 process to give 1.5x performance wins on AES encryption relative to Intel based systems. The Oracle Database uses AES CFB encryption to provide security to database storage.

With an increased page size of 2GB on the Oracle SPARC T4 processor, the Oracle Database can allocate 2GB page sizes to the System Global Area (SGA), a group of shared memory areas that are dedicated to a database instance.

Engineered Systems

The InfiniBand networking stack has undergone some significant improvements in Oracle Solaris 11. Improved support for Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP) providing an RDMA accelerated alternative to TCP over IP which is transparent to the application, and support for Reliable Datagram Sockets v3 (RDSv3) providing better performance and and observability for Oracle RAC databases, are the heart of many enhancements to Oracle Solaris 11 specially tailored for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud which take advantage of InfiniBand networking. For example, the Oracle Exadata Database Machine uses the Intelligent Database protocol (iDB) to communicate between database and storage nodes. iDB implements a function shipping architecture in addition to the traditional data block shipping protocol provided by the database giving dramatic improvements for parallel performance.

Many modern systems are based on a NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architecture, where each CPU or set of CPUs is associated with its own physical memory and/o devices. For best I/O performance on these systems, the processing associated with a device should be performed close to that device, and the memory used by that device for DMA and PIO should be allocated close to that device as well. Oracle Solaris 11 adds support for a NUMA I/O architecture, which allows for operating system resources (kernel threads, interrupts, and memory) to be placed on physical resources according to the physical topology of the machine, specific high-level affinity requirements of I/O frameworks, actual load on the machine, as well as resource control and power management policies.

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center

Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center helps to drive data center efficiencies and reduce complexity by providing an interface to actively manage all compute resources anywhere on the network. From a single console, administrators can manage system firmware and software updates, or monitor operating system telemetry, and rapidly take a server from discovery to bare metal provisioning. Oracle Enteprise Manager Ops Center includes support for the lates Oracle Solaris 11 features, including the Automated Installer and the Image Packaging System allowing administrators to manage a wider range of operating systems across the data center.

Oracle Optimized Solutions

Oracle Optimized Solutions leverage the innovative, built-in functionality of Oracle Solaris 11 to create complete enterprise infrastructure solutions, or individual components in an existing environment, which enable customers to lower their total cost of ownership, mitigate risk, accelerate business agility, and improve user productivity. Each solution is assembled using best practices garnered through years of field experience building complete solutions for customers. Solutions are optimized for performance and availability and fully tested to ensure stability. New Oracle Solaris 11 features such as Oracle Solaris 10 Zones, built-in network virtualization, and improved software management all combine to give solutions that have been identified, integrated and tested to save customers time and money.