Oracle outlines hardware strategy

Software vendor plans to release first Solaris update since 2005 while reinvigorating x86 servers and tape technology

Superstore: Oracle plans to increase the capacity of Sun's tape portfolio by a factor of 20

Six months after closing its acquisition of Sun, Oracle has unveiled ambitious plans for its storage portfolio and confirmed the first new release of the Solaris operating system in six years.

John Fowler, Oracle's executive vice president of systems, outlined the vendor's plans for the Sun portfolio in a webcast held today. One of the headline announcements covered the upcoming release of Solaris 11, pencilled in for next year.

Sun released the previous incarnation in early 2005 and Fowler asserted that Oracle will continue to release Solaris 10 updates. A migration programme for enterprise customers is to commence shortly.

"[Solaris 11 will be] as large of a product release as Solaris 10 was in terms of core capabilities and seminal changes," he said. "We will see a straightforward evolution."

Fowler went on to outline lofty plans for storage technology. He claimed, over the next five years, Oracle will increase tape capacity from 1TB to 20TB. Performance is projected to increase fivefold during that time.

"Storage is the most exciting area of systems development today," he said. " Storage is [currently] one of the most expensive elements of the datacentre. It is also one of the most challenging. That is going to change dramatically over the next five years."

Fowler also stated Oracle is intent on making waves in the server space. Sun's SPARC-based offerings will benefit from "continually incrementing performance improvements", he claimed, while the x86 arena will also be given a great deal of attention.

"We will continue to aggressively develop both blade and rack server systems for the x86 marketplace," he said. "The x86 marketplace is about purchasing across the enterprise spectrum."