OmniTI, a provider of web application development and infrastructure management for companies that require scalable, high-performance, mission critical solutions, today announced the release of their newest version of OmniOS, an open source operating system for application developers in the Solaris community looking for a reliable, innovative application deployment.

Publicly released in April 2012, OmniOS is a continuation of the OpenSolaris legacy and aims to address the longstanding issues that occurred when Oracle discontinued open development of the operating system. OmniOS builds on Illumos to make a complete OS. It is a cost-effective and open alternative to Oracle Solaris 11.

This new release represents the best-available version of OmniOS for production deployments.

Key new features include:

1. Multiple ZFS Enhancements: OmniTI has added support for ZFS feature flags as well as a new ZFS pool format that facilitates portability of zpools among Illumos distributions. This helps developers avoid vendor lock in and allows distributors to integrate more features, such as ZFS I/O throttling capabilities, recently developed by Joyent. ZFS I/O throttling also provides more consistent I/O latency to competing zones, and is now available in OmniOS.

2. Kayak Network Installer: Kayak now features a richer tool set in the mini-root environment, allowing administrators to better diagnose and correct issues encountered during network installations.

3. Updated DTrace Functionality: The dynamic tracing framework now supports time-ordered output (-x temporal), making results easier to understand on multi-processor systems.

4. Improved IPMI Support: This allows ipmitool to operate via the local BMC device rather than being limited to LAN operation. Administrators may now interact with their IPMI modules directly from the OS, even those that may not be configured with network access.

According to Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of OmniTI, “OmniOS has been well received by the Open Source community since our launch last spring and our customers have experienced great results. This new version enhances the stability and security of OmniOS, giving customers even more flexibility in a stable robust environment. OmniOS fills a need in the post-Solaris world for a lightweight installation focused on traditional enterprise environments as well as cloud deployments."

The newest version of OmniOS is immediately available for download at omnios.omniti.com. In addition, the new stable version has also been made available for Amazon Web Service (AWS) users as a public Amazon Machine Image (AMI), for those deploying in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon EC2 is a web service that provides re-sizable compute capacity in the cloud, designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers. OmniOS brings the power of ZFS and DTrace to developers working in this environment.

OmniTI uses OmniOS for customer applications, and is making it generally available to the Solaris community for free with the intention that it becomes a standard platform for open source development. In addition to the growing open source community around OmniOS, OmniTI also offers more traditional commercial support.

About OmniTI
Founded in 1997, OmniTI designs, builds, and operates web infrastructures and applications for companies that require scalable, high-performance, mission critical solutions. Targeted to B2C organizations, the company’s expert engineers specialize in providing complex, high-transaction, and large-volume data applications. Unlike competitors that offer limited web design, development or database services, OmniTI offers end-to-end, purpose built technology solutions that include strategic consulting, web design and development, database services, Internet architecture support and managed services. OmniTI is committed to continuous innovation that enables businesses on the web to move at customer speed.