IBM and Sun Microsystems made an agreement which resulted in Solaris 10′s optimization for IBM’s BladeCenter servers.

IBM is willing to help optimizing Solaris for its hardware. The announcement was made by Sun’s president, Jonathan Scwartz.

“We’ve signed up our first tier 1 systems vendor as a Solaris supporter: It’s IBM, and their decision to provide comprehensive support for Solaris on BladeCenter definitely puts them ahead of the other blade vendors in offering a truly OS-neutral product,” Schwartz said.

The “BladeCenter ecosystem” is composed of 700 partners. Solaris is now among Windows, Linux for x86 and Power chips and AIX (IBM’s version of Unix).
The support and sales for Solaris will be made by Sun which is currently trying to build popularity for its OS. The x86-based which works both on AMD’s and Intel’s chips is going to be open-source.

Sun’s OS is in contrast with IBM’s AIX but this doesn’t keep them to collaborate.

The Solaris Operating System is a computer operating system, based on the open-source UNIX SunOS developed by Sun Microsystems. Solaris is being released under the Common Development and Distribution License, an OSI-certified Open-Source license.