Now that Oracle Solaris 11 is out, its time to do 2 things --

1) Its time to see what's in it, what's new and why its important, and then assess why it might make sense to begin evaluating it for your needs

and

2) Its time to acknowledge, give thanks to and congratulate all the R&D personnel, architects, engineers, designers and testers who've put in so much effort and energy into helping make Solaris 11 (and SunOS 5.11) what it has become -- starting way back circa 2004 and, more importantly, culminating in the recent years and months -- staying focused on the execution, unwavering in the face of various challenges.

For #1 above, here are a few good things to get going with

- Watch the product launch replay

- Visit the Solaris 11 Spotlight section on oracle.com

- Get comfortable through introductory videos and detailed "how-to" guides (ex: how to create and publish IPS packages), white papers on the new default root file system, ZFS, and reap the benefits brought on by the fundamental shift in easing the administration experience

- Look at the next level of software lifecycle management that is enabled by technologies such as Automated Installer and Image Packaging System -- that dramatically address patch management-related challenges

- Understand how we continue to innovate in areas of service intelligence, reliability and availability

- Start to evaluate enhancements in virtualization capabilities -- whether influenced by the need to consolidate or motivated by the need to have increased service mobility across physical systems, leveraging hardware-level abstractions

- Gain more control over your network-centric services through enhancements in network resource management, observability and I/O performance

- Look beyond your existing infrastructure with confidence that you can re-host and transition to newer systems with the use of Solaris 10 zones running on top of Solaris 11

- Relish in the fact that you can do all this, get your data to be secure and encrypted and more, on both, SPARC and x86-based systems.

- Stay informed by keeping an eye on relevant blogs, which we've begun turning up recently.

- Go through a hands-on lab

- Sign up to take a class or just opt to watch various videos to begin to raise your comfort level with these technologies

For #2 above --

There are many ways to do that. One way is to just say "thanks" with an email, a post, or a simple card,  similar to this one seen at a Barnes and Noble store recently.  The front of the card is followed by what's inside... and as the saying goes, now more then ever "it's what's inside that counts"

And here's the inside of the card:

So, what are you waiting for ? Go download and try it out, and please let us know what you think of it!