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ORACLE SOLARIS 11 EXPRESS

KEY FEATURES AND BENEFITS Oracle Solaris 11 Express builds on the proven technologies of Oracle
Innovation matters—increase business
Solaris 10, and is a fully-supported production release delivering
efficiency and lower costs.
immediate access to the latest advanced features of Oracle Solaris 11.
BENEFITS
• Enhanced Availability. Greatly reduces
Oracle Solaris 11 Express is supported on more than 1000 systems,
planned downtime by eliminating traditional including our latest engineered systems Oracle Exadata and Oracle
patching with dramatic reduction of
maintenance-related reboots and time to
Exalogic Elastic Cloud.
reboot

• Complete Built-in Virtualization. Deploy advanced technologies

Delivering fully virtualized networking Enterprises are under tremendous pressure to do more with less, roll out new business
features that provide the highest levels of
performance with the lowest overhead,
services faster, fit more servers into the same space, and comply with new regulations.
adding even more flexibility to Oracle Oracle 11 Express allows customer to take advantage of the latest Solaris features like
Solaris Zones network virtualization, data de-duplication and built in data encryption.
• Improved Data management. New
Improve IT Efficiency
advanced storage features such as built-in
deduplication, encryption, and thin The new availability features greatly reduce planned downtime by up to 50% while
provisioning, which enhance the industry-
virtually eliminating traditional patching. Maintenance related reboots are greatly
leading Oracle Solaris ZFS technology and
deliver the best storage foundation for reduced and the new faster boot system can decrease system boot time to seconds.
virtualized and cloud environments
Next generation virtualization
• Additional Security. Provides advanced
Delivers fully virtualized networking features, in addition to existing system and data
transparent security to users, applications,
and devices while simplifying security with virtualization features that provide the highest levels of performance with the lowest
fine-grained delegated management, overhead, adding even more flexibility to Oracle Solaris Zones
implementing the latest security standards
and continuing Oracle Solaris' leadership Unified Software Administration
position as a highly secure operating
Simplifies the acquisition, installation, and maintenance of Oracle Solaris and
system
additional Oracle, third-party, and in-house applications through a network-based
package system that uses dependency-aware tools to update the software stack while
virtually eliminating opportunities for errors during updates.

Secure Operation
The leading-edge security features in Oracle Solaris helps you reduce the risk of
intrusions, secure your applications and data, assign the minimum set of privileges and
roles needed by users and applications, and control access to data based on its
sensitivity label.

Guaranteed Compatibility
Oracle Solaris 11 preserves guaranteed binary compatibility with over 11,000 third-
party products and customer developed applications. Enhancing our built-in
compatibility features, now with Oracle Solaris 10 Zones customers can quickly and
easily move entire Solaris 10 environments into their own separate zone on Oracle
Solaris 11.
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Oracle Solaris Technologies

With Oracle Solaris 11 express you get access to the latest technologies, features below
are key highlights that we have enhanced from existing Oracle Solaris features.

Oracle Solaris Zones

Oracle Solaris Zones is an OS-level virtualization technology built in to Oracle Solaris.
Using flexible, software-defined boundaries to isolate software applications and
services, this breakthrough approach allows multiple private execution environments to
be created within a single instance of Oracle Solaris.

By dynamically controlling application and resource priorities, businesses can define

and achieve predictable service levels. System administrators can easily meet changing
requirements by quickly provisioning new Oracle Solaris Zones, or moving them from
system to system or disk to disk within the same system as capacity or configuration
needs change.

Oracle Solaris Zones are now fully integrated with the new virtualization, management
efficiency, security and file system features of Oracle Solaris 11, making them ideal for
rapid “thin” provisioning of new services within datacenter and cloud environments.

Image Packaging System (IPS)

New with Oracle Solaris 11 is the Image packaging system. IPS is the next-generation
packaging system that provides safe system updates and upgrades. It has built in
dependency checking to ensure that the correct versions of required software are
installed on the system for a system that is more reliable and optimized.

Oracle Solaris ZFS

Oracle Solaris ZFS is designed from the ground up to deliver a general-purpose file
system that spans from the desktop to the datacenter. Anyone who has ever lost
important files, run out of space on a partition, spent weekends adding new storage to
servers, tried to grow or shrink a file system, or experienced data corruption knows the
limitations of traditional file systems and volume managers. Oracle Solaris ZFS
addresses these challenges efficiently and with minimal manual intervention. Oracle
Solaris 11 Express includes new advanced storage features such as built-in
de-duplication, encryption, and thin provisioning that enhance our industry-leading
Oracle Solaris ZFS technology and deliver the best storage foundation for virtualized
and cloud environments.

Security
Oracle Solaris’ user management and process rights management and Oracle Solaris
Zones together allow hundreds of applications and multiple customers to be hosted on
the same system. Administrators can leverage features such as Secure by Default,
Trusted Extensions, and the Service Management Facility to minimize and harden
Oracle Solaris even more.

With Oracle Solaris, you can

• Verify your system’s integrity by using Oracle Solaris’ digitally signed binaries and
file verification features

• Reduce risk by granting only the privileges needed for users and processes, with
“root as a role” providing higher levels of security separation and auditing.

• Simplify administration and increase privacy and performance by using the

standards-based key management and cryptographic frameworks in Oracle Solaris,
automatically leveraging hardware cryptographic acceleration and Trusted Platform

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Module support when present.

• Secure your system using dynamic service profiles, including a built-in, reduced-
exposure network services profile

• Control access to data based on its sensitivity level by using the labeled security
technology in Oracle Solaris with trusted extensions

Predictive self healing

Predictive self healing is an innovative Oracle Solaris feature that automatically
diagnoses, isolates, and helps you recover from many hardware and application faults.
As a result, business-critical applications and essential system services can continue
uninterrupted in the event of software failures, major hardware component failures, and
even software configuration problems.

• Oracle Solaris’ fault management architecture continuously monitors data relating to

hardware and software errors. Automatically and silently detecting and diagnosing
the underlying problem, it can automatically take the faulty component offline on
SPARC and x86 processor–based systems. Easy-to-understand diagnostic messages
link to articles in Oracle’s knowledge base to help clearly guide administrators
through corrective tasks requiring human intervention.

• Oracle Solaris’ service management facility creates a standardized control

mechanism for application services by turning them into first-class objects that
administrators can observe and manage in a uniform way. These services can
automatically be restarted if they’re accidentally terminated by an administrator, fail
as the result of a software programming error, or are interrupted by an underlying
hardware problem.

Oracle Solaris DTrace

System administrators, integrators, and developers can use the dynamic instrumentation
and tracing capabilities in Oracle Solaris to see what’s really going on in the system.
DTrace can be safely used on production systems—without modifying applications. It
is a powerful tool that gives a comprehensive view of the entire system, from kernel to
application; and enhanced with popular providers such as Java. With DTrace, you can
delve deeply into today’s complex systems when troubleshooting systemic problems or
diagnosing performance bottlenecks—in real time and on the fly. This level of insight
reduces the time for diagnosing problems from days and weeks to minutes and hours,
and ultimately reduces the time required to fix those problems.

Enterprise Support
Support for Oracle Solaris 11 Express is included in all currently available Oracle
Solaris support offerings: these include Oracle Premier Support for systems, Oracle
Premier support for operating systems, Oracle Solaris Premier Subscription for non-
Oracle hardware.

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Contact Us
For more information about Oracle Solaris, visit oracle.com/solaris or call +1.800.ORACLE1 to speak to an Oracle representative.

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