HP to distribute and support Sun's Solaris

Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have announced an expanded partnership in which HP will become a key distributor of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system. According to Jeff Carlat, Director of Marketing in the HP software group for the ProLiant and BladeSystem platforms, "Customers have been demanding increased levels of support for Solaris 10" and this partnership is the result. Sun previously signed distribution deals with IBM and Dell in 2007. HP, certified with Solaris since 1996, will be distributing and providing support for Solaris on its ProLiant server and BladeSystem platforms.

Mark Potter, HP's senior vice president and general manager responsible for BladeSystem and Insight software said that "this agreement represents a very important milestone for our customers". According to John Fowler, the executive vice president of Sun's systems division, the new deal between the companies "dramatically expands the available market for Solaris". Solaris is now certified for over 1,000 systems.

The partnership means that customers will now have one source – HP – for their initial purchase and hardware and software support. The two companies will also be working on integrating Solaris 10 into HP's Insight software. However, the new agreement does not pertain to HP's Integrity line of servers which will continue to ship with the HP-UX OS.

More details, including a short video featuring Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and executive vice president John Fowler about the Sun and HP OEM agreement, can be found here.

See also:

• HP Joins Solaris Community, Jonathan Swartz's blog post.
• DoS vulnerability in Sun Solaris 10, a report by The H.

(crve)