One of the highlights for me at Oracle OpenWorld was our announcement of the next update version to Oracle Solaris 11, named Oracle Solaris 11.1. Since November 2011, we've done a lot of work not only to polish existing features and fix literally hundreds of bugs, but also add many new features that give yet more reasons for using Oracle Solaris as the deployment platform for Oracle workloads - particularly the Oracle database. Over the last few years since the Sun Microsystems acquisition, we've had our developers sitting in Redwood Shores with the Oracle database team figuring out how to best optimize that combination and provide a level of integration that no other vendor (or solution) can match.

Oracle Solaris 11.1 is often the first release many customers will adopt due to perceived instability of '.0' releases. In reality, however, we've seen incredible adoption already and all our existing customers are loving the new technologies like Image Packaging System (IPS), Automated Installer and ZFS Boot Environments, consolidated network management and network virtualization, and of course the existing features that are so critical to creating private, hybrid or public cloud environments like the Oracle Solaris ZFS file system and Oracle Solaris Zones server virtualization.

If you haven't already gotten on board, there's plenty chance to catch up. More importantly, Oracle Solaris 11.1 really provides a platform that is significantly easier to manage than any previous Solaris releases - to the extent that it should be relatively straightforward for any experienced Linux administrator to get up to speed (if they're struggling, we have ways to help). So take a look at what's new in Oracle Solaris 11.1 and start planning your deployment now!

If you missed the announcement, you can see the full video of John Fowler's keynote at Oracle OpenWorld here: