Fujitsu gives Solaris x86 the big squeeze

HP now the lone OS holdout

By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 11th June 2008 17:17 GMT

Sun Microsystems has firmed up Fujitsu as a Solaris reseller on x86 boxes, which leaves us wondering when HP will break and join the rest of the crowd.

Sun this week announced the deal with Fujitsu Siemens, which will see Solaris offered as an option on some Xeon-based Primergy servers. Fujitsu joins other Tier 1 server vendors IBM and Dell as official Solaris x86 buddies. And it's a pretty natural move given Fujitsu's ties to Sun around SPARC servers and its familiarity with Solaris.

HP now stands as the lone Tier 1 Solaris holdout. The company has claimed to offer support for Solaris on its x86 servers for a long, long time. It even has a Solaris on ProLiant web site that boasts a graphic of Sun and HP folks shaking hands around their "HP and Solaris partnership."

Meanwhile, Sun places HP's Solaris support in the "alleged" category because HP does not have an official license from Sun to back up the operating system.

How bothered is Sun by HP's lack of a license? Well, it's willing to grumble about it here and there but not to undermine HP's program in any meaningful way, which, we suppose, would require legal action.

HP likes to brag that tons of customers are turning to Solaris on ProLiant as a means of moving away from Sun. If this is indeed the case, we have to wonder why it doesn't strike a more formal agreement with Sun. At this point, things are looking very religious at HP, and we thought Mark Hurd was all about pragmatism. ®

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