Sun Microsystems got a vital mouthful of oxygen yesterday from IBM, which has announced its willingness to extend support for the Solaris OS on select x86-based IBM System x servers and BladeCenter servers.

The mutually profitable agreement signed yesterday should enlarge Sun’s customer base for Solaris, while at the same time offering IBM customers more variation when it comes to choosing an operating system for their servers.

IBM and Sun's support of interoperability via open standards also means that customers will be able to extend their infrastructure by connecting new platforms easily, while preserving their initial investments.

IBM is the volume leader in the high-performance segment of the Intel-based server market, where technology innovation is crucial. IBM's X3 Architecture, the third generation of the Enterprise X-Architecture, has positioned IBM as the fastest growing vendor in high-end x86 servers in the first quarter of 2007.

Solaris, dubbed “the most advanced OS on Earth” by Sun, runs on more than 820 x86 platforms, while more than 3,000 x86 applications work on it, among them including IBM Websphere, Lotus, DB2, Rational and Tivoli.

Following their agreement, Sun and IBM will invest in testing and system qualification to provide joint customers with the knowledge they need about Solaris’ performance and reliability on IBM’s systems.

Among the servers cited to have Solaris support are IBM BladeCenter HS21 and LS41; and IBM System x3650, System x3755, and System x3850.

"IBM provides the broadest choice of server platforms and operating systems to customers with AIX, Linux for x86 and Power, Microsoft Windows Server and now Solaris," said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president & group executive, IBM Systems & Technology Group. "IBM is the first major x86 vendor to have such an agreement with Sun; and the first big vendor apart from Sun to offer Solaris on blade servers. Today we expand that agreement to help clients migrate to Solaris on IBM x86-based System x servers."

The partnership should add value to Sun’s operating system, while for IBM it should provide a more diverse server environment. IBM senior vice president Bill Zeitler explained during a conference call hosted with Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz that the impact on IBM’s other offerings should be minimal and that IBM will continue to offer its proprietary AIX version of UNIX on its blade servers, also reassuring that the company’s push for Linux is unchanged.

"I don't see a single operating system as being the choice," Zeitler said. "I think customers make choices, markets make choices, and mature vendors react by responding to those customer requirements. And that's what we're trying to do here. We're still going to continue the investments we make in AIX; we think it's an excellent, highly scalable, highly reliable offering. But just pragmatically, there's a lot of customers who love Solaris and are loyal to it, and so I don't see this as compromising our commitment to AIX or compromising our commitment to Linux or the other operating systems we have. I think it's a reinforcement of our commitment to open interoperability and to the market."

"We're thrilled to be working with IBM to bring the Solaris OS to the broadest market possible -- they are a natural partner for Sun," said Jonathan Schwartz. "Solaris adoption continues to accelerate, among both the open source and commercial communities -- driven by bundled virtualization for servers and storage, support for thousands of ISVs, including nearly the entirety of IBM's software portfolio, and outstanding operational economics. Solaris is clearly a choice customers are demanding."

Among the advantages mentioned for Solaris in the joint press release worth mentioning are Solaris ZFS (a 128-bit file storage system, which decouples the file system from physical storage in the same way that virtual memory abstracts the address space from physical memory, allowing for much more efficient use of storage devices), Predictive Self-Healing and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace).

Zeitler also mentioned that customers who download Solaris 10 from Sun own their own and later install it on their System x servers from IBM will enjoy support from Sun as always, but that in 90 days from now on IBM will too offer support for Solaris.