In a move that has sparked intense debate, Sun
Microsystems and Intel have announced a broad strategic
alliance.
The venture is centred on Intel's endorsement of the Solaris
operating system and Sun's commitment to deliver a comprehensive
family of enterprise servers and workstations based on Intel's Xeon
processors.
The alliance also includes joint engineering, design and
marketing efforts as well as other Intel and Sun enterprise-class
technologies.
As part of the announcement, Intel has declared its support for
Solaris as a mainstream OS and the enterprise class,
mission-critical Unix OS for Intel Xeon processor-based
servers.
Intel also now endorses Sun's Solaris, Java and NetBeans
products and will actively support the OpenSolaris and open Java
communities from which they continue to evolve.
For its reciprocal part, Sun is to complement its current
offerings with Intel-based systems such as uni-, dual- and
multi-processor based servers and workstations supporting Solaris,
Windows and Linux.
Intel and Sun will also collaborate around greater than four
processor scale-up Solaris-optimised systems. Sun expects platforms
based on Intel architecture optimised for Solaris to be unveiled in
the first half of 2007.
Sun believes Intel's model of alternating new microarchitectures
with new process technologies on an annual basis will offer
"outstanding" building blocks for its customers.
This move will surely cause a storm. Teaming up so strongly with
Intel will surely drive Solaris adoption, a long term strategic
goal for Sun.
More interestingly, it will also drive Xeon-based systems up the
server value chain to datacentres and other high-performance
environments currently dominated by IBM and HP with its range of
servers powered by the Itanium chip it co-developed with, er,
Intel. Has a gauntlet been thrown down by someone?
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