Hello, everyone, and welcome to the launch of Solaris 11.1. My name is Markus Vuel. I run the Solaris Core Technology Group here at Oracle, and I'd like to give an update on what we actually released with Solaris 11.1 and also highlight a little bit about the actual customers that we already have today, what customers are already doing today in their real world environments with Solaris 11, how Solaris 11 is actually transforming is allowing them to transform their IT environment, how it's allowing them to innovate, how it's allowing them to become more productive in their environments. So before I jump into the details, one of the big things that's really changed for us in the Solaris Organization has been the increased investment that Oracle has been putting into us. So my team, for instance, has grown by about 30% in the last 2 years.
So we've had a huge influx of new talent, people coming, both on the experience side as well as college hires that are helping us to actually drive the technology forward, both in terms of some of the features in Solaris, but then also working with some of the other teams around Oracle to figure out how we can integrate things and provide customers with the best possible overall solution. So before I go into the details about Solaris, I just want to quickly highlight the bigger picture and the bigger strategy of Oracle. For those of you who tune into Oracle OpenVault a couple of weeks ago, you've probably seen the massive investments that Oracle is making in the cloud space. And what this means for customers is that if you want to run-in the public cloud Oracle's public cloud environment, we can provide that for you. If you want to run those kind of applications that we have in the public cloud in your private environment, but have it fully managed by Oracle, we can provide that.
If that means you want to have a hybrid of the 2, we can provide that for you. And it doesn't matter whether this is software as a service, platform as a service or infrastructure as a service, we provide all that in a very, very comprehensive fashion. And not only do we provide that, but we also give you a very flexible path for adopting that for your environment at your own pace depending on what your situation is. And so there's a whole combination of products that provide the foundation for these kind of capabilities, and SOLARIS 11 is a key one within that. So we coined Solaris 11 as the first cloud operating system last year.
And a lot of you are probably asking why is that? What is it that is in there that is allowing us to do that? And there's a massive amount of investment that we have made in Solaris 11 that we have continued with 11 Update 1 in order to provide you with the capabilities to run your environment in the most secure and in the most effective way within your cloud. And one of the areas one of the two things that we're bringing together here is the ability to have all these traditional properties that Solaris 11 offers: security, availability, the observability with DTrace, all these other pieces, but bringing that together with the latest and the greatest cloud infrastructure features, cloud management features, things like the automated install that we already had in Solaris 11, the fast and fail safe both from a OS perspective, but then also from a storage and a network perspective. And then, of course, providing you with the right tools around that, such that you can actually manage this kind of environment at a very large scale in the most safe, in the most secure, in the most available way and bringing these by bringing these two areas together.
And so let me just show you some examples here of what customers are doing today. So in the following, customers some customers obviously want to do infrastructure as a service. And the example here is a major U. S. Mobile provider.
Actually, it's U. S. Cellular, and they are providing they're taking Solaris 11, they're running it on top of logical domains with the latest T4, Spark T4 Processors, and they're providing infrastructure as a service to their internal customers at a very, very attractive price performance point, highly available, highly secure. I'll be talking about that in some more detail later on. And then other customers, they want to build a platform as a service.
So here's an example of AAPT, which is a major Australian service provider. And they're doing this today using the Oracle database. They're using Solaris, they're using Sones, they're using the nice thing about Sones is that it works across different hardware platforms. So they can provide these kind of services on top of the X Series, the X86, the T Series and also the M Series products. And then of course, other customers want to provide the full stack.
They want to provide the applications on top of the platform, on top of the infrastructure. And we have people like Ativas, which is a Brazilian service provider that is doing that. They're providing SAP as a service in conjunction with the Oracle database, running again running in this case, running on a Spark supercluster, which has all the optimizations for the Oracle database, the latest enhancement in Solaris 11 and it brings it together with the latest enhancements in the T4 hardware. And all of this is running over 40 gigabit InfiniBand networking. So again, from what we've been talking about, about Solaris 11 being the first cloud operating system, for a lot of customers, that is already reality.
They've already gone out, and they're already deploying the cloud infrastructures in this kind of fashion. Yes, and so at this point, these are just some of the highlights. These are just some of the highlights here in terms of some of the logos of customers that are doing interesting things today. There's already more than 2,000 customers already in production today. With the release of 11.1, I would expect significant uptake that we're seeing there.
The other critical thing, of course, for customers, what customers want to need in order to be able to deploy it is having all the major ISV applications certified. And at this point, we have most of the major ISV applications certified on SOLARIS X11. SAP, for instance, was certified within a few weeks of the actual launch. All the other major most of the other major vendors like SaaS, any other third party vendors here are at this point on Solaris 11. And of course, there's a long list of Oracle applications.
Being part of the biggest ISV in the world now has really changed things around quite a bit and it's made it a lot easier for us to get a lot of these Oracle applications certified. In fact, some of the Oracle applications like the Oracle Database and WebLogic were already certified even before Solaris 11 shipped in the context of these engineered systems. And in that context, they were actually running on Solaris 11 Express. Yes, so at a high level, what are we providing here with 11.1? And it's very similar much very similar at a high level what we already did with 11, which is building on top of that, which is continuing to provide the best cloud infrastructure, and I will talk in some more detail about what that means, but allowing customers to unleash the power of cloud, of virtualization that's underneath there, being able to become a lot more flexible, a lot more agile and quickly deploy services, quickly tear them down, quickly reprovision without having to worry about the actual underlying physical hardware.
And then the other big area of investment, of course, is the integration up and down the stack. So traditionally, of course, we've been working closely with our partners on the hardware side, but being part of Oracle now, it allows us to work very closely with the various teams within Oracle, be it the Oracle database, be it the Java team, be it other teams. We're working very closely with them to provide the best solution for the Oracle stack. And last but not least, as I was jokingly say to customers, it's still safe to run Solaris 11 in a non cloud environment. There's a lot of investment that's going into the traditional side of the house where we're looking at performance, scalability, security, all these other kind of parameters the customers are used to.
So we are, of course, very, very heavily investing in those and making sure that we keep up with the latest innovations also in the hardware with bigger and better hardware that's coming down the And so in terms of the actual features, what does this really come down to? What does this actually provide for a customer? What do we mean with this life cycle management in the cloud with the cloud infrastructure features that we have in Solaris? And the slide here shows you the typical scenario. I'm an administrator.
I'm trying to update my machine. And one of the things that we have done here with SOLARIS 11 is we've completely streamlined the whole process. So as you go through these different steps of updating the machine and making doing the planning for that and then doing the actual reboot, we've actually gone in and we've completely streamlined that to the point where we can actually do this whole process in a matter of just a couple of minutes, depending on the size of the machine, of course, that may vary. But for a typical size machine, that's something like 2 minutes, right? And that's a huge step up.
And this means if I'm trying to manage a large scale environment and doing this having those kind of this kind of capability available is absolutely critical. It's helping me to actually minimize the amount of planned downtime that I have to take into account here. The other constructed this, we've introduced a new packaging system, as I mentioned earlier. And as part of the new packaging system, it tightly keeps track of all the dependencies there. And by constructing this on top of CFS as the default root file system, it allows us to do the process that I just explained where you're going through all the steps.
But it also allows you that as you go through the steps and something bad happens, your machine goes down, there was a problem with the application for whatever reason, something bad happens, you can just go back and you just reboot your machine and you just bring it back up in the previous stage in the previous state. And so that means you're never going to end up in a situation where you're completely breaking the system, you have to reinstall it. All it means is that worst case scenario, you're going to be back in service by doing another reboot. You're going to be back in your old previous boot environment and the whole cycle takes something like 4 minutes or so. And that's a very, very critical aspect for customers because if I'm trying to I know I have a limited set of planned downtime, a limited amount of planned downtime, I'm trying to upgrade my system and I want to make sure that if something goes wrong, can just quickly go back in the previous state without being sort of in a limbo state here.
So that's something that's absolutely critical. And so the other important aspect, of course, is doing this in a large scale fashion. And by having a lot of this built into the operating system allows you to quickly automate that, right, be it with your own scripts, be it by using Oracle Enterprise Manager Op Center, it allows you to actually do this now in a large scale fashion where you do this across 1,000, if not tens or in some cases 100 of 1000 of either physical or virtual machines, you can do that in a very, very effective way. And so what are customers actually doing with this today? So I mentioned earlier, we shipped to Large 11 less than a year ago, and we are seeing customers taking full advantage of these capabilities.
So this is a public services customer. They're running a very, very mission critical environment where they have SAP running on top with the Oracle database on top of Solaris 11 with some of the latest Oracle hardware. And they have Solaris clustering across these different nodes for high availability purposes. And one of the other things that we've done since we've shipped Solaris 11 as these other products, Solaris Cluster, Enterprise Ops Center, Enterprise Venture Ops Center and Solaris Studio came out, all of these products are now packaged in the new packaging in the new IPS format. So that means if I'm trying to upgrade my Java and there's a fix that's required in the kernel for the new patch level, the packaging system will automatically keep track of that and will enforce that.
It will not let me do that update until I've actually applied the new patch level in the kernel. And so same thing here, in the case of this customer, they trust the system so much that they're now automatically doing the updates, have cron jobs running, they're doing this overnight and the system rebooting the system and they just come back the next morning and it just shows up in the new state. So that's those are the kind of innovations that customers are able to do now with their environment, in this case, with a very mission critical environment without any of the human intervention that you're used to with other operating systems. And so this is just a quote from them, patching is so easy that we just automatically trust it, and they just update it every week. Yes, the other key area that I want to highlight here, of course, in the context of cloud is having super efficient virtualization there.
And we have that today with either SARS zones, which is the virtualization built into the operating system and also the underlying hypervisor based virtualization that we're doing with logical domains today. And so this is kind of a bigger picture here around that. Customers, of course, are used to the high availability to the 0 overhead that the high efficiency that zones provide them. What we've done now with Update 1 actually, we've actually providing programmable management APIs, which means that you don't have to have a separate management agent running there. If you want to write a script, you don't have to go down the CLI level.
We provide you that higher level service high level surface that you can tie into and you can use it's language independence, so you can use C, you can use Java, can use Python and you can automatically remotely program your environment and remotely start up zones to reconfigure them without actually having to log into the zone's console into the system. And of course, the other thing is the continued update, the continued cooperation with the off center team, and they are about to come out with their update 2, which I believe is already out, which is fully integrated with all the latest features in Solaris 11.1. One of the major enhancements in this context is we've completely streamlined the way you do you run zones off of shared storage. So we've greatly simplified that. It's very easy now to run zones not just on shared storage, but in a lot of cases customers can now run this in an encrypted fashion.
And you can just quickly as you move your zone over to a new machine, it's very, very easy, dramatically simplified the way we do all the management of that. The other big area, of course, is virtualization of the network. And I'd like to give you a quick outline here of what how this has been evolving over time. So with Solaris 10, of course, we had we introduced zones. It initially came with a shared stack, which means that essentially all the traffic flows together and goes through a shared TCPIP stack.
With Update 4, we actually enhanced that such you can actually have dedicated TCPIP stacks, but everything will still flow together at the NIC level at the MAC layer. And what we're doing what we then did with 11 is we introduced with the introduction of Crossbow and all the network virtualization capabilities. We actually we did 2 things. 1 is we actually we extended this virtualization all the way down to the MAC layer, and we've also we've pulled in a lot of the networking services into the box itself. And so what that means is that with Solaris 11 today, you can actually you can run the your environment where you have fully dedicated network interfaces virtual interfaces.
You can have all networking services like load balancing, like routing and firewalling all built into your host as opposed to having to have separate physical infrastructure capabilities all the way down, all the way out into the network infrastructure. There's a bunch of protocols that we introduced there, which allows us to actually talk to the switches, discover the switches, talk to them, set priorities and then enforce those priorities. And that allows us to do things like convergence of fiber channel over Ethernet, but it also gives us a lot more flexibility in the way we can actually prioritize traffic and enforcing SLAs all the way into the network. Yes, and this was what's happening on the Ethernet side. And with the recent acquisition of Seagull, that also gives us the ability to actually have the latest and the greatest InfiniBand network infrastructure tightly integrated with Solaris as well as with our storage.
So what Sigo allows us to do is that or allows you to do as a customer, you take advantage of the underlying 40 gigabit bandwidth that you have in the InfiniBand fabric and that will be refreshed at some point to 100 gigabit. And then on top of that, you can actually emulate your Ethernet traffic and your fiber channel traffic. They have a very, very sleek management solution around that, which allows you to manage that, have it fully integrated with the Solaris virtual networking virtual network infrastructure, and you can actually run your whole environment in the most highest performing and also in a fashion where it's you're reducing the administrative cost as much as you can. So it's pretty exciting, and I'm very excited about this acquisition. A bunch of really smart guys, I think, are required there.
And my team is already busy working with them trying to figure out what's the best way to integrate these pieces together. And storage, I think, is the other interesting piece here is that it's not just about compute nodes talk to the network infrastructure. The interesting part here is extending some of these SLAs all the way into the storage infrastructure and providing you the fastest access to your storage box. A whole bunch of enhancements that went into Solaris 11 on security space. I already talked about the mutable zones.
Those have been shipping since Solaris 11 itself. A whole bunch of other enhancements, of course, in 11, unified crypto engine that allows you to automatically take advantage of the underlying crypto framework. CFS encryption was another key feature, a whole bunch of different features that you can see on the list here. And with Update 1 now, we're adding a whole range of new features in addition to that. I already talked about the new remote programmable interfaces with what we call a remote access daemon that allows you to essentially reduce the number of logins that you need into machine.
Ideally, the administrator doing the day to day maintenance should no longer have to actually into the machine directly. And the other big feature I want to highlight here is the ability to automatically do your compliance checking. And what does that mean? A lot of customers that I talk to complain about the increased scrutiny that they're getting today from their auditors. And they don't have in other cases, they don't have very good tools to automate that and to prove to their auditors that everything is fully compliant.
And with 11 Update 1, we have a new tool, a new framework that we're implementing there, which allows you to quickly automate that. You can basically set your policies. And based on the policies you set, the new framework will allow you to quickly run a report and automatically come back and tell you whether you're compliant, if you're not compliant, in which areas you have holes and hopefully convince your auditor and yourself, of course, that you're in full compliance there. In addition to the framework, we have fully integrated that with our auditing. So that means that as you're doing these checks, all of this gets pulled out, all of this information gets pulled out and automatically gets audited and provided to you.
Another area I want to highlight is CFS. We talked about this some of this last year already with 11. There was all the major services there today with 11. We introduced dedu functionality, which allows you to compress your data down by orders of magnitude. In some of our internal use cases, we were seeing a 10x deduplication ratio.
And the other key feature, as I already mentioned, was the data set encryption. With that, of course, we have all the major services in conjunction with CFS. You have all the file sharing capabilities, be it through NFS, through SIFs, through various other protocols. All of that is there today. Again, same thing here, a whole bunch of different updates that have gone into the 11 Update 1 release.
And one of the things I just want to quickly highlight here is the thin provisioning for Unmapped. And that means that it can actually dramatically reduce the amount of storage that's used there by quickly freeing up your LUNs there. So what are customers doing today? I quickly alluded to some of at a high level what customers are doing, and I want to go into a little bit more detail here and show you what this really means for you as a customer. So on this slide here, you see what AAPT is doing.
As I mentioned, they're providing both actually providing both Infrastructure as a Service as well as Platform as a Service. And in this case, in the Infrastructure as a Service example, they were actually able by using the latest Zones technology, using all the network virtualization, they're able to achieve consolidation ratios up to 40x of what compared to physical environment, 40x compression ratio. That's something that's very hard to achieve with any other virtualization technology, and speaks for the efficiency for the fact that it's just it's the lowest possible. It's a virtualization technology with the lowest overheads out there in the industry. And one of the things that they're also doing in addition to just achieving these high consolidation ratios, they are also getting additional cost savings by pulling in some of the networking services into the actual physical box.
So in other words, rather than having a dedicated firewall physical firewall, dedicated load balancer, this just becomes a virtual function, virtual environment within your physical box. And that's a tremendous cost savings in addition to what you're already getting by the high consolidation ratio. The other example is the example of U. S. Cellular.
They have built their infrastructure as a service environment. And what they have been able to achieve is they have been using logical domains, and they have typical cloud fashion. They have small, medium, large, 3 different types of VMs that people can check out. And if again, they fully integrate that with the Solaris Cluster capabilities. So that means not only they're providing these services in a cloud fashion, but all of these services actually are clustered across and that gives them a super high level of reliability.
So they're getting the 10x consolidation, they're getting the 5x performance enhancements that you would expect by consolidating things, but they're also getting this in conjunction with the latest enhancements on the Solaris Cluster side. Yes. So this is just in broad brushstrokes, an outline of what we have in terms of cloud capabilities. And in total, I think we had something like over 300 projects that went into Solaris 11 Update 1. So again, this is just a highlight that I'm some of the things that I'm highlighting here and doesn't really do justice to all the work that went into Solaris 11.1.
So let me move on and talk a little bit more about what we're actually doing in the context of engineering engineered systems and also in terms of just a general integration of the Oracle stack. So at a high level, if you look at this chart here on the left here, we're continuing to build Solaris and we're building all these other components as the best of breed, best in breed components out there. So in other words, it doesn't matter whether you're trying to run Oracle app, whether you're running your own in house app, you're running a Java app, you're running a 3rd party app, we want to make sure that we have Solaris Solaris is the best platform to run any of these components on. And the same thing is happening, of course, with all these other products, right? However, being part of Oracle, it allows us to actually have these kind of deep engineering discussions with our partners in the database team, in the Java team, in any of these other application teams and have these discussions and figure out how we can actually do engineering that allows us to make the overall experience better, be it in terms of performance, be it in terms of security, be it in terms of availability, you name it.
What can we do to enhance the overall experience as opposed to just improving each layer at a time. And of course, in the context of Engineered Systems, we are then taking these components and all these different optimizations across those components and we're creating an even more restricted environment where you take the fastest connections out there, the fastest interconnect with 40 gigabit InfiniBand connections. We're taking the latest T4 capabilities of the T4 processor, taking all these other enhancements in the Oracle database, and we're building these engineered systems that are tuned and optimized for the best performance and the best security. And so what do customers actually get out of this? I mean, the following slide here just shows you how by providing these engineered systems, how it actually has allowed us to dramatically shrink down the time it takes customers to deploy some of this.
So the following here shows you that in some cases, the time it takes to actually install and configure the system has been pushed down to something like less than a week very consistently. These are just different customer examples here. And the total time to actually go live in most cases is significantly below 8 weeks, which for those of you who are used to taking all these individual components and stitching them together is a very, very impressive result, I think. And how are we achieving that? As I said, it's a whole new lifestyle that we are that we have embarked on here.
And it means that as we are producing, as we are in the design phase of a new product, we have these ongoing discussions with these other partners and we figure out how can we best optimize the overall solution. Is it something let's say you have a new performance problem, you're trying to get things speeding things up to the next order of magnitude of performance to the next higher level, we can actually go in and we can look at, do we solve the problem in the database? Is it something we want to offload into the operating system? Is it something that needs to be solved in the rack layer? Is it something that needs to be pushed down all the way into the physical hardware?
Those are the kind of discussions that we're having. And I'll give you a lot of examples in the following slides where we show examples of how we push things down into the operating system, how the Oracle database is taking advantage of some of these features, new features in Solaris and also talk about how some of these features are actually going to be showing up in the future of Spark processes also. And then of course, as we go through the rest of the life cycle of product development, testing and then ultimately support, all of these things can be done in concert. So if you the customer is calling us and you have a problem with your database performance, we chances are we have the same setup somewhere in one of our labs and we can quickly reproduce that and we can quickly track down what the issue is. You're dealing with a single vendor, one throat to choke, greatly simplifies a lot of the traditional problems.
And so this is an eye chart here, which shows you all the optimizations or some of the optimizations that we've done so far. And a subtitle here says it's the tip of the iceberg and what that means is that it's only been a little over 2 years since we've started working with the database team. At this point, I have some of my engineers co located with them and they're sitting together on a regular basis and there's a whole bunch of ideas that we're currently working on and that will be showing up in future SOLARIS 11 releases and ultimately SOLARIS 12. Next slide, just a continuation of that, work in observability, performance, availability, multi tenancy, there's work going on in all of these different areas in order to provide customers with the best possible experience. And let me give you some examples of what customers are getting out of this.
So one of the big features that Oracle 12c is going to introduce is the ability is the integration with the underlying D Trace capabilities. And what that means is that Oracle 12c, if you're an administrator, you run into an issue, you basically you're an administrator now able Oracle 12c will automatically query the DTrace IO output from Solaris 11 and we'll bring them back to the administrator and they're going to be able to quickly identify isolate the problem and figure out whether it's a problem that's in the operating system, it's a problem that's in the database or whether it's a problem that's outside of the box that be it storage or be it network. Another key feature, I talked about zones earlier, another key feature that's another key feature that we're now enabling with Spark Supercluster. And that means you can actually take a Spark Supercluster and you can carve it up into secure environments with Zones. It's fully compatible with the 10 with the 40 gigabit InfiniBand protocols that are running there in order to talk to the back end storage.
So that's something that's going to be enabled with Spark Supercluster before the end of this year. One other example of this is the integration with auditing. So with SOLARIS 11 Update 1, we're actually exposing a lot of the auditing information to the next version of the Audit Vault. And with the next release of Audit Vault, that information will automatically be read out and will be fully integrated with the log information of the database. So you have a single pane of glass where you can see what's going on in your box across those different products.
And as I mentioned earlier, the next level of this is essentially where we're looking at how we can offload some of this functionality down all the way into the physical hardware. And by doing that, similar like we had with the crypto, where we actually by offloading the crypto functionality down into the physical hardware, we were able to speed things up by a factor of 4 or 5. And we expect in some of these cases, we expect similar breakthrough performance enhancement for the Oracle database by doing that. So that's something that's going to be obviously, silicon takes longer than software. So this is something that's going to be showing up in one of in some of the future Spark processors.
Without going into so much detail here, similar work is going on with the Java team also, very excited about that. One of the key features that I would like to highlight here is the integration of DTrace into the Java mission control tool. So the Java Mission Control is a way to actually do tracing within your JVM, figure out where the bottlenecks are. And with this has been extended now with the release of Java 7 Update 4. This has been extended and you can now have your Solaris plug in and look all the way down into the Solaris kernel and figure out where your bottlenecks are all across the stack.
And of course, a lot of the other work going on around performance. This is just an example of Java 7, and you see how performance has been improving. A lot of very dedicated effort here, and we were able to improve overall a factor of 2.2 over the course over the lifetime of Java 7. And these are just 2 I want to highlight here, of course. We're working very closely with a lot of the other applications teams, figuring out how we can enhance the applications, how we can make them run faster, how Solaris can be the best platform for any of these applications.
Following some examples of what customers are actually getting out of this, I already mentioned Ativas earlier. They were able to get a 10x consolidation ratio, and they were able to actually reduce the overall license consumption by a factor of 3. So these are not 10% improvements, these are not 20% improvements, These are some serious enhancements here that we're providing, serious value that we're providing to those customers and that makes it so compelling to run Solaris 11 in this kind of environment in the kind of a supercluster environment in conjunction with the Oracle store sales with all the enhancements from the Oracle database. It's a very, very attractive offering. The other thing that we're seeing is there's quite a few customers now that are actually moving over to Solaris and to Spark from some of these other environments, like KED is an example.
They actually they used to run on their environment on an HP Superdome and they've now completely moved it over running that with Solaris 11, running that in the context of Spark Supercluster and getting again 20x consolidation ratios for their business. So significant savings for them. And the list continues. I won't go into all the details. Another interesting one to highlight is the China Tobacco Company, which actually went and they did a complete takeout of they had this existing IBM environment with IBM Power Hardware, DB2, WebSphere, and they completely replaced that.
And they're now running WebLogic and the Oracle database on top of Spark Supercluster, on top of Solaris 11, on top of the latest T4 processor. So I'm seeing increased frequency. I'm seeing requests from customers coming to me needing help for how to port over from HP UX, how to port over from IBM Power and AX over to Solaris. And we have great tools available. We have porting guides.
We have various other white papers. It's a fairly straightforward thing, actually. Another example of Oracle, what is Oracle doing, Oracle internally or internal IT. This is a great example. This is the so called global single instance, which means that that's what's processing all of our financial data, that's what's processing all of our HR data, this is processing critical customer data and all that.
So it's one of these things where if this thing goes down, bad things happen. Larry will be very unhappy, and it really affects a lot of different people. And they're in the process of converting that over into a Spark supercluster with SOLIRIS 11, they're using storage expansion racks and also running this in conjunction with Exologic. And they're creating they're able to get a huge consolidation ratio. I think they're replacing something like 30 EMC racks and condensing that all into Spark Supercluster with these storage expansion racks.
So if for customers, it's a great reference point, it's a great reference story, very excited about that. It talks a lot about the optimizations that we're doing across the Oracle stack up and down the stack and how we're taking some of these enhancements and bundling things up in the form of engineered systems. And the following, I'll be talking about some of the traditional properties that Solaris is providing and how we've enhanced the investment there. And one key area, of course, is the area of performance and scalability. So there's a lot of features already in Solaris 11 that have allowed us to parallelize the network stack, providing new Myo capabilities that allow us to optimize things across a very complex piece of hardware.
And the key feature that we're adding here in Update 1 is the next generation of our virtual memory subsystem. And what that means is that as we are scaling up to these large scale environments, some of our T4, N4 based machines that we're currently running on, they are providing some of these machines have 32 terabyte of main memory at this point. And so that's something where our old VM subsystem just would run into bottlenecks here. And with the new next generation VM2 memory management, it actually has new features like the predictor, where we go in, we sample the actual page consumption Based on the pattern of the application consuming the pages, we can then actually go back, we can pre assemble some of the pages. And so that dramatically helps us to speed up things and provide make sure that we have the right set of pages available, the right mix of pages available at any time.
And some of the enhancements, some of the results we're seeing is a 2x enhancement of our database start and stop time. And in terms of the actual memory mapping, the actual effort required in order to do memory mapping, we're seeing a 45x improvement there. So tremendous benefits, and we're confident that with this new functionality, we will be able to scale up to 100 and ultimately 1,000 of terabyte of main memory on some of these systems. And just looking, the following slide here is just showing you how, over time, how we've actually increased the how things have grown. So with Solaris 9, we were running on max configuration that Solaris 9 would run on was just a little over 1 terabyte of main memory.
72 threads and 72 cores used to be considered a very, very large box. With Stellaris 10, we've dramatically increased that. We're running on systems now with 4 terabyte of main memory, over 1,000 threads. With Stellaris 11, that allows us to scale up with all the enhancements now in the VM subsystem that allows us to scale up to these boxes, to the M4 boxes that are shipping in next year with 32 terabyte of memory. But the next generation after that will be will have 64 terabyte of main memory.
We're doubling the thread count, the number of cores going up to above 1,000. So there's a lot of enhancement that we've been putting in and of course the road continues here as we are getting ready for our planning for SOLIRIS 12, we need to, of course, take into account future systems that are going to exceed those numbers. So I gave an overview of what's in Solaris 11 today, what is new in Update 1. Again, these are just highlights, but at a high level, essentially a whole bunch of investments that we've made around cloud, around making it easy to manage clouds, making it secure, making them highly available. I've talked about some of the optimizations that we did with the Oracle database, with Java and with some of the other Oracle applications.
And I've also highlighted some of the investment that's going into some of these traditional properties. All right. With that, I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Bill, Bill Nesheim. Bill is going to be talking about the launch of Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, and he's going to explain how the new capabilities in 4.1 allowing you to build your highly available enterprise class environment.
Thanks, Marcus, for the chance to be here today. Really appreciate the opportunity. My name is Bill Nesheim. I'm the Vice President at Oracle responsible for Solaris Platform Engineering. Part of my team is responsible for Oracle Solaris Cluster.
Today, we'll be talking about Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1, our latest release of our enterprise high availability suite for Solaris. Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1 brings true mission critical availability to the cloud. We've already heard from Marcus how Oracle Solaris 11 is the best UNIX for Oracle environments. It's built for cloud infrastructures and is the number one UNIX for enterprise applications. Oracle Solaris Cluster is a critical component of the overall portfolio, bringing high availability to the Solaris environment.
Oracle Solaris cluster has a long history supporting many releases of Solaris. We released Oracle Solaris cluster 4.0 last year along with release of Oracle Solaris 11. We've released the latest update of Oracle Solaris Cluster, which we've named 4.1 in conjunction with the release of Oracle Solaris 11.1. Oracle Solaris Cluster supports Spark platforms, X86 platforms, any place you run Solaris in an Oracle VM environment together with zones taking full advantage of Solaris features such as zones, such as legacy containers, such as any of the kinds of role based access controls. It's a rich set of availability features for Solaris 11.
Any kind of high availability framework is responsible for monitoring the health cluster component. What's unique about Oracle Solaris 11 is the rich and deep integration that Oracle Solaris cluster has with each of these critical Solaris Technologies. Oracle Solaris Cluster monitors the health of the cluster components such as servers, storage, networking, the operating system itself, the network stack, the overall virtual machines and of course applications. This allows the application to tolerate any kind of failure in the environment, be it a storage failure, a network failure or a complete server failure or even what's more common and more important, a failure of an application at a given point in a given application stack. Oracle Solaris Cluster has robust algorithms that have been proven over many years, including heart beating, cluster membership, cluster configuration, Quorum, device fencing.
There's a rich set of capabilities that have been proven in production deployments in Solaris cluster. This allows a recovery of the fast recovery of the cluster infrastructure and applications to make sure that your environment your mission critical environment remains available 24 hours a day. Oracle Solaris Cluster has a rich history of supporting the rich set of virtualization capabilities in Solaris. Oracle Solaris cluster supports zones, supports cluster of applications between zones or even just failing over zones from one system to another. Oracle Flares cluster also supports failing over applications from 1 Oracle VM server domain to another Oracle VM server domain.
This provides very efficient availability and multi tier savings, giving you a true multi tenant application clusters where you can combine application, web and database tiers into a single environment. This is really critical technology for continuous cloud services. Today, I'm pleased to have with me, Manakshi Kalbasu, who is the Director of the Engineering team responsible for Oracle Solaris Cluster. How are
you doing, Nina?
Thank you. I'm doing very well. Thanks a lot.
Really pleased to have you here. We have an exciting set of capabilities that your team has added to Oracle Solaris Cluster over the past year, which are now available in Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1. Can you comment a little bit on the Oracle Solaris Cluster innovations that we've made?
So we've tried to keep make sure that all the features that we have had in the past, we've actually tried to make that available in Solaris 11. Not to forget that there's a lot of innovation in Solaris 11 already, and we've been trying to make sure that those features and functionality are available in highly available environment. So there's a lot of interesting stuff that has gone into 4.1, which we can talk about if you want. There's applications that we've gone ahead and enhanced. There are improved performance enhancements that we've done.
We've tried to make sure that applications that can run that are only in Solaris 10 can be run within the containers. Inside.
It's a
great set of capabilities. But before we start getting into the specifics here, let's talk a little bit about how some customers are using Oracle Solaris Cluster today. So there's a customer that we have in Europe, a public sector customer that is implemented a multi tier application environment on the Oracle Solaris environment using Oracle Solaris and zones in that environment. This is a really true multi tenant installation. And tell us how they're using cluster.
So this particular customer is actually using SAP on SOLIRIS 11. That's something absolutely new. So what they've actually gone ahead and done is that they have created zones where they run database in a zone. So they have clustered the zones where they run the data base on Solaris 11. They also have SAP running in the application tier in a zone again and they have made that What's interesting in this configuration is that there is a lot of dependencies between SAP and the database and you want to make sure that the applications come up and if the database is down having the application server staying up and running.
So there are a lot of dependencies that have to be taken care of.
So they use Oracle Slurice cluster to manage the dependencies between each of these applications in a highly available environment. That's absolutely correct. That's fantastic. And this is working so well for these folks. One of the unique capabilities of Solaris 11 is the integrated easy update capability.
And these capabilities of both Oracle Solaris Cluster and Solaris 11 are working so well in this environment that these folks actually have automated their regular patching operations.
That's correct.
So this is a patching not only the operating system, patching cluster, handling using things like rolling upgrade capabilities. So this is fantastic to see this. So, another example, we have a customer that is implementing clustering across a couple of T4 systems. These are systems that support Oracle VM for Spark. As I understand it that they're using Oracle Solaris cluster to provide high availability between these systems.
Correct. So it was actually really interesting to hear them at Oracle OpenWorld. They had a session and it triggered a lot of questions from a lot of people who think that they are trendsetters. So it was really interesting. What these people have done is that they have created Oracle VMs, different sizes of them.
They call them large, medium and small. And they have different applications actually running in them. And they have all their applications. They're not just traditional applications, traditional ISV applications. They actually have their own applications as well that they have put into the logical view.
And that's where the Oracle Solaris cluster capability comes in so much into play where we can provide availability to even a custom application.
That's correct. And it's pretty straightforward and simple for people to actually create make their applications highly available and run them on the SaaS cluster.
Okay. So this is what people have done with Oracle Solaris cluster and Solaris 11. Let's talk a little bit about the kinds of enhancements that we've made to Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1. First of all, one of the major features of Oracle Solaris Cluster is its rich portfolio of application agents. In the Solaris 10 environment, we had a vast array of agents that for applications that have been qualified on Solaris X.
I know your team has been working very hard to qualify additional agents for Solaris X. Can you comment on a few of the specific ones that are now available?
Right. So at the time where we shipped the last release 4.0, there were certain set of applications that we had and of course, it's more first most important that the ISV applications or for that matter Oracle applications are available on Solaris 11 before we can make them highly available. In this particular release, we've actually almost more than doubled the applications that can be run-in this Solaris Cluster and this Solaris Lemon environment. Some of them that I can I should talk about is we have People's Job Scheduler?
PeopleSoft Job Scheduler, so you can make that available. So people's batch jobs, you can guarantee that they're going to get overnight. Correct.
So job scheduler as well as the app server is also available. We have SAP that we already just talked about. We have the web tier, the Oracle web tier, which is the content manager, that's available. WebLogic server is available. And again, we have Oracle 11 gs R2 also available supported.
But I want to point out that we can continue to run we can actually continue to run SOLARIS 10 applications on SOLARIS 11 with SOLARIS cluster in the branded containers.
Okay. So that brings you even a richer set of applications to the Solaris 11 highly available environment?
That's correct.
Okay. Let's comment on can you comment a little bit on the integration with storage? Clustering and storage have had a long history of a very deep working relationship. But as people are moving more to a NAS environment, deeper integration with NAS capabilities becomes even more important. We have a wonderful storage product that provides both NAS and SAN kinds of services, the ZFS storage, right?
Can you comment a little bit on what we've done for deeper integration there?
Sure. So we had support for ZFS SA as a storage box as an as box. We have that support already in place for Solaris Cluster. But what we've done is extended that to be able to use it with this Cluster Geographic Edition, which allows cluster to be placed in completely different geographies, unlimited distance and use the ZFSFA replication technology underneath it. So this is a support that we also have in place now.
This is particularly interesting, not just for ZFSD customers, for customers who want to use this replication, but also in the supercluster context. So supercluster, you have Solaris Cluster also part of it will make applications highly available. And most of these application need to use storage, would use ZFS SA as their storage box. So you can continue to have disaster recovery capability in supercluster for such applications using ZFS Saa replication because Solaris cluster is now providing that support.
So you have the cluster framework will provide a framework a capability of failing over your entire operations from one data center to another?
Absolutely correct. Yes.
Fantastic. One of the key capabilities of Oracle Solaris 11 is the zones capability and the ability to do very deep and efficient virtualization. Lots of enhancements went into Oracle Solaris 11.1 around zones. Can you comment a little bit on the kinds of capabilities that we've added to Oracle Solaris Cluster to take full advantage of the zones capability in Solaris 11?
Sure. So zones is we support zones as a black box. We support zones as a zone cluster, where you can create different zones on different boxes and actually cluster them together and have a whole 3 tier deployment within it. Now of course, there are various ways we see customers using it. But the enhancements specific enhancements we've done is basically, one that you can have a zone cluster where you can create a S10 branded zone and run this S10 application inside it and we talked about it briefly, but now you can run it in zone cluster as well.
The other major enhancements we've done is support for exclusive IP. So Solaris has support for exclusive IP.
Right. Solaris 11 allowed 1 to deploy basically its own private IP stack for each zone. So with a private IP stack now you can support that in an environment.
Correct. So that's something pretty exciting. The other there are some other enhancements we have done to improve the performance and the management of zone clusters itself, as well as the I talked about the configuration wizard already. So that's something that's pretty exciting.
Yes, that is very exciting. And certainly the biggest advantage of Oracle Solaris Cluster in a zones environment is really there's one installation of Oracle Solaris Cluster. So even in a virtualized environment where you may have many different applications and many different applications and tiers of your application, there's only one point of management, single point of management, a single point of installation, single point of patching for the environment.
That's correct.
Fast failover, making sure that the system can failover very quickly when something bad happens. Can you comment a little bit on the kinds of extensions that we've made in that area, particularly around IO?
Certainly. So one of the areas that we've actually made enhancements is if the connection to the disk, for example, to the storage rather goes down for some reason, we've actually improved the performance significantly that from minutes to seconds. And that's pretty significant where we can detect faster detection of the storage of these outages and be able to make sure that the right thing is done and the failure will happen.
Right. So you're making the operating system basically behave differently environment, the right thing to do is not to retry forever until the disc finally figures out how to give you the data. The right thing to do is to notify the cluster framework, so that an intelligent decision can be made about moving the overall workload from one cluster node to another cluster node.
And the faster you can do it, the better it is.
Right. The better service level. So it means minimal service interruptions on failover.
That's correct. That's just one of the enhancements we made there. There are other enhancements we've made in the user line space to improve the failover performance of applications. That's something we've gone into.
And it's all about availability. So it's really, really important that if we have the deep knowledge within the cluster framework of what's going on in the operating system, then we take full advantage of that to provide better availability for applications.
That's right,
yes. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about one of the things that this use of exclusive IP stacks and taking full advantage of the zones enhancement of Solaris has allowed us to do. So I understand it with an exclusive IP stack, you can actually run labeled networking. So what does that mean to cluster?
Right. So what we've done is extended that to an extent. So zone cluster already provides you the isolation between the different clusters. Different applications could be running in each of these own clusters. What we've done is extended it such that you can be absolutely sure that these are secure environments.
With Soliris trusted support in basically making sure that these zone clusters are completely secure.
So they're completely isolated, no data transfer between these zones at all, even though they're all being managed by a common high availability provider.
Absolutely. So you can have completely secure zone cluster that you just want 3 people in the whole company to be able to access and you can ensure that. And so the different levels of protection that you can ensure.
Yes. This is particularly important in the data privacy environment that we're all concerned about.
That's correct.
So this is a very rich set of capabilities around virtualization, around simplified deployment, around availability and disaster recovery with the richest set of agents that are available for any kind of operating system based cluster environment. Thanks, Meena, and congratulations to your team on this release. Really appreciate you being here.
Thank you very much, Bill. Okay.
Just to sum up, there's real advantages in having an overall red stack of applications, operating system software, hardware, firmware down to the storage. By putting these components from Oracle together in our shop, we can test engineer these components together. We can test these components together. We can integrate these components seamlessly with other Oracle properties such as the Oracle database, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Applications. Oracle Solaris Cluster is built specifically on Oracle Solaris for Oracle Solaris.
Is focused entirely on making Oracle Solaris applications highly available. We can take full advantage of deep kernel integration, deep Solaris virtualization capabilities and Oracle Solaris cluster is tested on a daily basis with every build of Solaris. We test every build of Oracle Solaris cluster. This provides you our customers with pre tested pre engineered systems where you can be sure that what you are running is what we are running and what we can support. So my thanks to Marcus for the opportunity to be here as part of the 11.1 launch.
And so back to you, Marcus.
Thank you very much, Bill. Appreciate that. Thanks for giving us an idea for what's in Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.1. And I would like to continue talking some more about we've talked about what's out there today and I would like to give you a little bit of an outlook on what we're currently working on. Of course, there's a whole bunch of different things we're working on.
I just want to give you a quick update on some of the highlights there. So one thing that Solar has always been very good for good and famous for has been the availability just the susceptibility that's built into Solaris. So with DTrace, we introduced an amazing tool that allows you to go in and figure out what's going on the depth of your kernel, figuring out what's going on there. And that's been a hugely popular tool both among administrators as well as among the developers. What we're doing here now is we're taking things to next level and we're providing the additional focus for the administrator, making it even easier providing a dashboard that allows administrator to go in and to make it make some of these capability available at their fingertips essentially.
We're looking at the data that we're collecting, one of the key things we're also looking at is how can we actually process that data over time, how can we shrink it down, What is the right data to collect? So we're just going to make it a lot easier to use some of this underlying functionality that's already in Solaris today. And what does this mean? In the following, I just want to give you an example of the kind of problems that customers can solve with that. So this is an example where your DBA, somebody calls you, your performance is not good of your database, some queries take too long.
And with the OpsAbilities engine with these new capabilities that we're building now, it will allow you to quickly go in, figure out what's going on, not just in your box, go out to your storage box, figure out where there's a problem in the storage box. In this case, you got a green light back, it's not a problem in the storage box. Then you go back in, you look at what's happening in your you're analyzing what's happening in your IO and the request comes back, and smaller chunks and figure out where exactly is the problem from coming from, how do I do that? And the analysis coming back essentially is that the backup process that's running on that machine is consuming way too much of your IO and that's what's actually throttling down your application. And then you go back and then you figure out what's the right thing to do in this case, just put a restriction on the amount of bandwidth and backup traffic that you can have in your box there.
Very critical for a lot of customers. It's one of the key problems that I'm hearing from people is that they have the ability to actually they don't have the right tools today or the tools they have, which is not adequate. So the things we're doing here is making it very easy, giving it to them at their fingertips and being able to not just look at things within the authorized host, but then also going out and understanding what's happening in your storage infrastructure. The other big area that we're investing in is around virtualization, of course, specifically around zones. We're introducing a new archiving mechanism, both archiving as well as templating mechanism, which means that you can quickly archive a zone, you can bring it back up as a virtual image, a virtual machine on top of logical domains, for instance.
You can also bring it quickly up again as a physical image and vice versa. So it allows you to be much more flexible with your archiving and also move across, for instance, different hardware architectures, like the yes, SunforU versus SunforE, for instance. One of the big area of investment, one of the things we are focusing on is actually making SONES more flexible and giving customers the ability to have different patch levels across the different zones. And so that means that some of your zones can actually run FCS, first customer shipment version, others can be running Update 1 or later updates. You can patch them independently and that gives you a lot more flexibility there.
I talked earlier about the enhancements that we've made on the networking space, how we've actually taken some of the network virtualization, extending that into the network, and that's a continued area of investment for us. We are part of the Open Networking Foundation. We joined them last year, And we're working with them trying to figure out how we can actually make the network virtualization experience much more flexible, how to work with various network equipment with a number of partners that we're working with. And ultimately, what we want to do is actually provide full observability across the network and also provide the SLAs required that allow you to safely talk to your storage box and have dedicated service levels dedicated to you. And one of the critical areas I talked earlier about how Solaris 11 has dramatically simplified the life cycle management, how it allows you to do that not just on a single box, but also across a large selection of machines.
And what we are we're continuing to invest in that. And the key investment that we're making here is the ability to actually completely eliminate your downtime. So what this means is that as you're going through your cycle, as you're trying to update your system, you can actually do that in a while the machine is still running and essentially you would have zero downtime at all as you're going through the whole system. They'll be fully integrated with the new packaging system and fully integrated with the rest of the Solaris infrastructure. So these are again just a few highlights of the work that's going on currently on the technology side.
There's of course a whole bunch of other things going on as well as a lot of work going on between the different product groups. And last but not least, I'd just like to give you a quick outline in terms of where we are with our future releases of Solaris 11. And the we released Solaris 11 at the end of last year. We are now we just released Update 1. And we're just the current plan is to release new updates at around an annual cycle.
And then of course, in parallel, we're also doing a lot of planning work around SOLARIS 12. We have not pinned down a date for that, but we're very busy trying to put that together and come up with a date for that. In parallel, we also we are going to be shipping a new update of SOLARIS 11 sorry, in parallel, we are also shipping a new update of Solaris 10. The update 11 is supposed to ship at the end of next year, and they'll be aligned with the release of the future hardware of the M4 and of the T5 systems. I hope I was able to give you a good high level overview of what features, what functionality is in Solaris 11 today as well as 11 Update 1.
And please stay tuned, we're going to have some follow on sessions where we're going to go into some more detail about what's in 11.1 as well as in Solaris Cluster 4.1. So please stay tuned for that.