Oracle Solaris​ 11 is the first operating system engineered with cloud computing in mind. It has been in development for six years since the release of Solaris 10 in January, 2005.

New features include built-in virtualisation across storage and networking via Oracle Solaris Zones; a management system that amalgamates data from across the stack; and compatibility with over 11, 000 applications. The new approach to virtualisation should help Solaris 11 scale across multiple IT environments so it can run better in a cloud, Oracle said. It also has failover features to keep applications going in case of a fault when running on distributed infrastructure.

The operating system is engineered to run on Oracle's Sparc processors, along with x86-based ones from companies like Intel and AMD. A notable feature is Solaris Packaging which is an image packaging system that automates installation, updates and upgrades of Solaris packages. The filesystem, ZFS, has received an upgrade as well with built-in de-duplication, encryption, compression and thin provisioning.

And what's most important: all of this is integrated, engineered and optimized to work together: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It's the power of this that makes Oracle Solaris unique.

For more information about Solaris 11 and how to download, please visit Oracle's official website