Dell agrees to use Sun's Solaris OS in PowerEdge servers

One-time bitter rivals in computing industry, Sun Microsystems and Dell Inc., now plan to reunite on server technologies. Dell, the world's leading producer of PCs, said it has cemented a broad partnership with Santa Clara, California-based server and software maker to build server computers based on Solaris operating system.

During a keynote speech on Wednesday at Oracle Open World 2007 conference in San Francisco, Sun Microsystems CEO and President, Jonathan Schwartz, and Dell Chairman and CEO, Michael Dell announced that they have signed a multi-year partnership, under which Dell will distribute Solaris and Sun Solaris support subscriptions on select x86-based Dell PowerEdge servers.

Dell said they have agreed to sell PowerEdge servers pre-installed with Solaris 10 in order to comply with an increasing customer demand for the OS on their servers. One-third of Solaris subscribers are using Dell's servers. "We heard from customers [who] wanted us to provide better support for Solaris so that's exactly what we're going to do," Dell said.

Sun believes the Solaris’ sale through Dell servers would help Dell generate lucrative revenue, and would substantially boost revenue from related support services. All revenue from server sales would be kept by Dell, while revenue from Sun services and support packages, which Dell would resell, would be distributed between the two companies.

"The relationship gives Dell broader reach into the global free software community with Solaris and OpenSolaris, and gives Sun access to channels and customers across the volume marketplace," said Schwartz.

Users of Solaris-based Dell servers, if any technical issues occur in their servers, will now be able to call Dell technicians to receive Solaris 10 support.

Sun’s latest partnership follows its earlier deals with two tech titans, IBM and Microsoft. In August, Sun Microsystems and its former bitter rival International Business Machines Corp. decided to unite on operating systems technologies, striking a blow against their mutual competitor Hewlett-Packard Co.

The technology majors have signed an "operating system agreement" under which the two companies would cooperate on server technologies. The deal allows Armonk-based IBM Corp., also known as Big Blue, to sell Sun’s Solaris operating system in some of its servers, making it the first major hardware vendor to resell Sun's one and only OS technology.

The deal would see IBM, which already supports the Solaris OS on some of its BladeCenter servers, install Solaris 10 on its "x" series of servers, including x3650 (two-socket Xeon), x3755 (four-socket Opteron), and x3850 (four-socket and higher Xeon MP) rack-mounted servers.

In September, Sun and Microsoft announced that they have entered into a broad partnership under which Sun will start selling server computers with Microsoft’s ubiquitous Windows operating system.

Under the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) deal between the two companies, Sun Microsystems, which earlier this year had agreed to use Intel's Xeon chips to power its servers, will be providing Windows Server 2003 on its x86-architecture based x64 server systems, which currently include the Blade 6000 and 8000, the Fire X2200 M2, the X4000 series and V40z systems.

The server and software maker Sun said its servers will come pre-installed with Microsoft’s Windows operating system, rather than forcing customers to install the world's wildly popular OS on their own.

Developed by Sun Microsystems, Solaris operating system was released back in 2005 under an open source license. At present time, the server OS has passed the 12 million downloads milestone.

Sun and Dell, who both make servers that compete with each other, have been clawing at each other for the last more than ten years. Sun, that last year took back the No.3 spot in the server market from Dell, controls 13 percent of the global server market, while Dell follows with 12% market share, as per the latest data from market research firm IDC.

Financial terms of Sun’s latest partnership with Dell were not disclosed.