When you stop laughing or shaking your head, read on.
Mr Sacconaghi says that he has no reason to believe that any partnership talks are underway, but he says that some kind of deal akin to the one that Dell has with disk array maker EMC might be beneficial to both Sun and Dell. This might sound crazy, but Mr Sacconaghi makes a good point when he says that Dell is losing market share in the high-end of the server market, where servers cost more and have more processors.
With the soon-to-be-announced Opteron-based Galaxy servers from Sun, Dell could, says Mr Sacconaghi, flesh out a unique high-end server offering that can run Windows, Linux, or Solaris. Considering that Dell’s top brass has just nixed the idea of using Opterons in the PowerEdge server line after mulling it over, the idea of Dell selling Galaxy Opteron boxes seems pretty remote.
Many people were calling for a Sun-Fujitsu-Siemens triple-play partnership on Sparc iron for many years, and Sun finally threw in the towel on its Millennium UltraSparc-V designs and went with tweaked future PrimePower servers based on Fujitsu’s Sparc64 clone of the Sparc chips for big SMP boxes for running monolithic workloads. Sun is still developing its Niagara and Rock multithreaded chips, and will eventually try to convince customers that these are even better than the Sparc64 boxes it will sell for the next few years as a stopgap.
This deal took years to hammer out, and that was between three partners (well, in many respects, it is really between two partners, Sun and Fujitsu.) Sun and Dell are enemies, and there are not enough years left in the 21st century for them to come to a deal, unless something really bad happens to either company.
Sun might consider having a big distribution partner for its Galaxy machines, but what Mr Sacconaghi doesn’t understand deeply enough (or ignored for the sake of some PR) is that Sun doesn’t want to partner with Dell to push Galaxy, but rather that it wants to use Galaxy running Solaris 10 to hurt Dell, and hurt it badly as it tries to push Linux and Windows on what will arguably be inferior x86 iron.
What Sun and Dell should do is partner to make sure that Solaris 10 is an option on the PowerEdge machines, but considering that Sun will try to compete against Dell with the mildly superior performance and technical characteristics of Solaris 10 compared to Linux 2.6, this seems very unlikely. Dell will surely install Solaris 10 on any PowerEdge server that customers want – and it will do it today.
But Dell is not going to go out of its way to help Solaris 10 on X86 get more traction, not when it is trying to promote either Windows or Linux as the answer to everyone’s data center problems. If Sun was heading toward bankruptcy, Dell might acquire it or Sun might concede to partner with Dell in the manner that EMC has. Other than that, these two will remain bitter rivals.
