IBM Corp. is extending its support for Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Solaris operating system to cover more of its x86 servers and blades, the two vendors announced Thursday.
Under the agreement, IBM will distribute Solaris OS and Solaris Subscriptions for some of its System x servers and BladeCenter blade servers. The servers include BladeCenter HS21 and LS41 servers as well as IBM System x3650, System x3755 and System x3850 servers.
IBM already supported Sun's flavor of Unix on some of its BladeCenter servers.
The move is part of IBM's strategy to offer users a range of operating systems and Sun's desire to have Solaris run on a wider set of hardware. IBM has its own AIX flavor of Unix and also supports Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system and several distributions of the open-source Linux operating system.
(More to come.)