The Sikh Geek

This is not new but Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems CEO, has a blog post entitled “Momentous Day for Solaris”. IBM is going to OEM Solaris on its x86 System X Servers. Schwartz is pointing to “choice” and when you look at what IBM System X servers support today then you have Windows Server, Linux (Red Hat & Novell) and now Solaris. So, if you’re an organisation running a load of commodity Intel based servers which servers are going to best protect your investment. Sun has seen a bit of a resurgence in Solaris since it opensourced Solaris in the form of OpenSolaris. I think this is a clever move by both companies. It is good for IBM where Enterprise customers want to move away from expensive Sun hardware running Solaris onto commodity Intel Servers and it is good for Sun where Enterprise customers are considering IBM Severs running Linux.

UPDATE

In the interest of fairness, the HP Proliant Servers support the same range of OSes and in fact have a compatibility matrix for Debian and Oracle EL (in addition to Red Hat and Novell SUSE). Cool!