Oracle Outlines Solaris Roadmap; Other Projects Not So Lucky

Determined not to make the same mistakes that Sun did when they bit off more than they could chew in some of their roadmaps, Oracle presented a more moderate amount of data today to outline their plans for the Solaris 11 operating system and SPARC systems.  This kind of transparency in planning has been rare for many of Oracle's acquired open source projects, and almost non-existent for projects like OpenSolaris.  Oracle's Server and Storage VP John Fowler held a recent presentation that talked about Solaris, but made no mention of the OpenSolaris Governing Board's likely dissolution or the emergence of Illumos, a fully open source clone of OpenSolaris.

OpenSolaris is clearly still important to Oracle.  Fowler said that Solaris 11 will essentially be a superset of the features in OpenSolaris, plus some Oracle technology.  "We've been a little quiet on the open source front," Fowler said. "It's not that we're not investing in Solaris, we're just investing to make sure that we have all the major components for the new release."  He says that virtually every subsystem in Solaris 11 has new features and enhancements.

Oracle is going to allow other operating systems to run on their hardware and enable their systems to run on other hardware.  In addition, Fowler said that Oracle is going to tightly integrate Oracle and Sun application/systems software with Sun's hardware to leverage the most from each.  The focus will be on higher performance, security, reliability, quality, and easier management.  

Fowler revealed that Oracle would commit to doubling the application performance of the SPARC platform every other year.  Fowler also presented a roadmap projecting the SPARC systems specs in 2015.  Pretty rare for Oracle:

• Cores:  Today - 32,   2015 - 128,   4x improvement
• Threads:  Today - 512,   2015 - 16,384,   32x improvement
• Memory:  Today - 4TB,   2015 - 64TB,   16x improvement
• Logical Domains:   Today - 128,   2015 - 256,  2x improvement
• Operating System:  Today - Solaris 10,   2015 - Solaris 11 
• Database TPM:  Today - 3M,   2015 - 120M,   40x improvement
• Java Ops Per Second: Today - 5k,   2015 - 50k,   10x improvement

A replay of the presentation should be up soon.  Fowler did not stay for questions and a panel of thirteen didn't answer many important questions from webcast attendees.