Oracle's winning technology for agility, efficiency, and value
While the benefits of cloud computing are well recognized, customers face challenges in implementing private clouds that consistently demonstrate favorable results. Oracle's technology powers cloud infrastructure with the best agility, flexibility, and efficiency.
Oracle’s virtualization model offers virtually zero overhead through built-in, no-cost technologies. In a cloud environment, virtual machines (VMs) are deployed in Oracle Solaris Zones, where they become agile, and lightweight while still robust and secure. Oracle's logical domains provide a second virtualization layer for hardware resources. They allow even higher levels of security and isolation for groups of VMs and fine tuning of I/O resources. Live migration of logical domains facilitates the lifecycle management of the underlying hardware and operating system infrastructure.
Oracle's SPARC T5 microprocessors provide 5x more hardware threads than the x86 E5 v2 processors used widely in cloud infrastructure. That allows SPARC T5 servers to support a much larger number of VMs compared with x86-based servers, especially because oversubscription of VMs onto hardware threads on X86 processors can create significant performance overhead. While virtualizing workloads on SPARC T5 servers introduces virtually zero overhead, it can introduce up to 25 percent performance degradation on x86 servers using leading virtualization software.
The unified archives feature of Oracle Solaris 11.2 provides the ability to encrypt and lock down archives, guaranteeing compliance of software stacks from deployment to production in the cloud. It also accelerates the deployment of VMs, with unique capabilities to create an archive of VM images that can be moved between bare metal and all virtualization layers. Oracle Solaris 11.2 also offers an OpenStack distribution that provides the basis for deploying agile clouds with open standards, ideal for heterogeneous environments.
Using Oracle Solaris and its advanced patch management features, organizations can gain a 16x advantage in the number of VMs that can be managed by data center staff, when compared with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and 6x savings in total cost of ownership.