As part of the relationship, Dell and Sun will cooperate on system certification and the development of products based on their solutions. In addition, Dell and Sun will also work together to secure support from key ISVs for Solaris on the PowerEdge servers.
According to the agreement, customers buying a Dell rack or blade server will get the option of installing Solaris or OpenSolaris which will be supported by Dell. Dell rack and blade servers are already compatible with Windows as well as Red Hat and SUSE Linux.
According to eWeek, Jonathan Schwartz, president and chief executive at Sun Microsystems said: This partnership will enable Dell to sell its hardware into both proprietary Solaris development market and the OpenSolaris community. Additionally, Sun will be able to mark its presence in the small and medium-size business market which it previously did not focus on.
Sun released the open source version of its proprietary Solaris operating system in June 2005. In August 2007, it started offering Solaris on select x86-based IBM x servers and Blade center servers.
Both the companies are competing with IBM and HP, who sold $4.9 billion and $4.5 billion worth of servers, respectively in the third quarter of 2007. In the same quarter, Sun sold $2.0 billion and Dell $1.6 billion worth of servers.
Source: ComputerWire daily updates
