IBM Expands Solaris Support on x86 Systems

By DE Editors

IBM (Armonk, NY) and Sun Microsystems (Santa Clara, CA) announced that IBM will distribute the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Solaris subscriptions for select x86-based IBM System x servers and BladeCenter servers to clients.

IBM and Sun’s support of interoperability via open standards means that customers can extend their infrastructure by connecting new platforms easily, while preserving their initial investments.

The Solaris OS is supported on more than 820 x86 platforms and runs more than 3,000 unique x86 applications including IBM Websphere, Lotus, DB2, Rational and Tivoli.

The Solaris OS includies Solaris ZFS, Predictive Self-Healing and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) to help customers improve uptime, cut costs, and speed time to market. The Solaris OS allows BladeCenter and System x customers to improve application performance on multi-core 64-bit x86 processors.

“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,” said Bill Zeitler, senior vice president & group executive, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “Today we expand that agreement to help clients migrate to Solaris on IBM x86-based System x servers.”

As part of the expanded support, Sun and IBM will invest in testing and system qualification. IBM servers that will support the Solaris OS include IBM BladeCenter HS21 and LS41 servers; and IBM System x3650, System x3755, and System x3850 servers.

The Solaris OS and IBM System x and BladeCenter servers bring to market a mission-critical platform with a wide array of leading configuration options such as native 10G Ethernet, InfiniBand and IBM-attached storage.

For details, go to IBM or Sun Microsystems, Inc.   

Sources: Press materials received from the company and additional information gleaned from the company’s website.