Can it have been so long already? Today is the 10th anniversary of the first
release of Solaris 10. This was a breakthrough release for Solaris, Sun, and really, the industry — it breathed new life into a class of systems software that some companies had written off long before. How did it do that? By including a wealth of groundbreaking new
features that raised the bar for what an enterprise operating system
should be. To use one of my favorite phrases: innovation matters, and the operating system is too critical a place in the application delivery stack not to innovate.
Many of these features are still ahead of
the curve even 10 years later, and form the core of yet more innovation
in Oracle Solaris 11: Zones and ZFS in particular stand out as enabling
technologies that give our customers the power of zero-overhead
virtualization, “nineteen 9s” data integrity, and simple, fast,
reliable provisioning and service management. If you look at the underpinnings of OpenStack as deployed in Oracle Solaris 11 today, innovation that’s still fresh from Solaris 10 will be staring right back at you. And it’s exciting to see that the same fundamental concepts like these that we thought were important to build into the OS in 2005 are starting to come into vogue with operating systems from other companies just ten short years later.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the success of Solaris 10 and beyond!
