14 DAY TRIAL // IBM is very well known as a producer and vendor of servers and associated services and the big blue company may very well be the most important player on the server and mainframe market field offering to enterprise and corporate customers a large selection of systems ranging from x86 compatible ones to supercomputers like the BlueGene line. Sun Microsystems on the other hand is better known as the company behind the Java programming language and the creator of the UltraSPARC multithreaded processors as the company's servers systems never enjoyed the popularity of the systems from the other manufacturers.
IBM and Sun Microsystems announced that the two companies signed an agreement under which IBM is going to start shipping x86 compatible blade servers featuring the Sun developed Solaris 10 operating system as a fully supported system. IBM's customers will have the possibility to choose Solaris 10 as their new operating system at the purchase of a System x or BladeCenter server. According to Sun's president CEO Jonathan Schwartz who was cited by the news site InformationWeek, IBM is the most important of all Sun's partners. IBM included unofficial support for Solaris sometime ago, but this agreement means that the support will now become official and the two companies will jointly develop drivers and applications.
"Hopefully, this is the beginning of what could be a stronger, cooperative set of offerings between our two firms," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president for IBM's Systems and Technology Group, speaking at the press conference concerning the agreement. He also noted that IBM and Sun are working to port Sun's Open Solaris operating system to IBM mainframes and supercomputers. According to him the adoption of the new operating systems does not mean that IBM is willing to drop its own AIX system or any other operating systems, including Microsoft's Windows and Linux. "I don't see a single operating system as being the choice," said Zeitler. "Customers make choices and mature vendors react."
This deal may very well be the most important step Sun ever undertook in order to increase its operating system's market acceptance through agreements with the server manufacturers and vendors. IBM is going to include the Solaris 10 operating system on its BladeCenter HS21 and LS41 servers that are x86 compatible and on the proprietary System x3650, System x3755 and System x3850 mainframes.