Oracle releases Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0

6 Dec 2011 Redwood Shores - Oracle has made available Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0, the first release providing extended high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) capabilities for Oracle Solaris 11, the first Cloud OS.

Oracle Solaris Cluster extends Oracle Solaris to provide HA and DR infrastructure required for deploying mission critical workloads in private, public and hybrid Clouds as well as enterprise data centres. Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0:

• Delivers built-in support for Cloud implementations through virtual clusters for secure deployment of mission critical applications.
• Allows customers to deploy multiple, isolated and secure virtual clusters through Oracle Solaris Zone clustering.
• Provides Cloud-ready application protection through fine-grained monitoring and policy-based application management, along with restart and failover capabilities.
• Enables easy multi-node installation of both Oracle Solaris and Oracle Solaris Cluster with the Oracle Solaris 11 automated installer.
• Offers unified installation experience, error-free software updates and automatic patch dependencies resolution with the Oracle Solaris 11 Image Packaging System (IPS).

Oracle Solaris Cluster provides the best availability solution for enterprise applications with:

• Instant and load-resilient failure detection and fastest service recovery time through kernel-level integration with Oracle Solaris 11.
• "Out-of-the-box" support of a wide range of Oracle and third-party software products, with application-specific failover in both traditional and virtualized environments.
• Easy integration of third-party and in-house applications.
• Built-in disaster recovery across unlimited distances.

Oracle Solaris Cluster is engineered to get the most out of Oracle hardware and software:

• Pre-tested with Oracle Sun servers, storage and networking components
• Integrated with Oracle SPARC SuperCluster T4-4
• Configured in Oracle Optimized Solutions to provide higher availability to Oracle's portfolio of pre-tested enterprise infrastructure services.
• Supports fail-over domains using Oracle VM Server for SPARC allowing dynamic compute resources to be adjusted for SPARC T-Series systems within a cluster.
• Integrated with Oracle Enterprise Manager for automated provisioning, discovery, configuration, and patching of physical and virtual clusters.

Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 includes built-in support for Oracle software such as Oracle Database 11g (single instance and Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)) and Oracle WebLogic Server as well as Oracle Solaris 11 services such as Apache, Apache Tomcat, DHCP, DNS and NFS.

"Oracle Solaris Cluster 4.0 delivers unrivaled high availability on Oracle Solaris 11 for enterprise applications and databases and offers comprehensive capabilities for keeping customers' most demanding applications up and running in the face of nearly every conceivable situation", stated John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle. "Customers can now combine the additional critical HA and DR features of Oracle Solaris Cluster with the new Cloud-ready features of Oracle Solaris 11 to help simplify their infrastructure, significantly reduce planned and unplanned downtime and protect mission critical applications in both traditional and Cloud deployments."