Two days ago, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) announced a partnership to distribute Sun's x86 version of their flagship operating system, Solaris, on select IBM xSeries and Blade servers.
This is a bit of a shock considering these companies have been longtime rivals in the hardware/software arena. IBM's UNIX operating system, AIX, and associated servers compete directly with Sun's Solaris operating system and Sun Fire servers for high-end computing needs. Additionally, Sun and IBM have launched a co-engineering effort to improve the performance of Solaris on IBM's hardware.
While this strategy allows Sun to better compete with Linux and Windows operating systems in the x86/x64 market, I wonder what this means for their own line of x86/x64 hardware. I assume their bread & butter is still their SPARC-based Sun Fire servers and considering how loyal their customers are; I can't see any changes happening here.
I have successfully used a Sun Fire/Solaris environment to consolidate and host a large number of Oracle databases migrated from Intel/Windows servers. I found Sun's operating system and hardware to be pretty rock-solid, but the cost of the SPARC-based servers always seemed a bit prohibitive. I haven't had the opportunity to run Solaris for x86 through its paces, so I can't comment on it, but I am please to see that we have more choices available to us now.
If you've employed Solaris for x86 in your production environment; I'd like to know how satisfied you are with the solution. Also, if you evaluated it against a comparable Linux operating system (Debian, Fedora, RHEL or Ubuntu), how did these match up?
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