by I just sat in on the teleconference with Sun and IBM announcing that IBM will become the first tier one vendor to resell Solaris on X86. Although HP has supported running Solaris on their Proliant line for several years, they have never had a reseller agreement or any kind of cooperative engineering agreement with Sun. IBM now has both; not only will they resell Solaris through their sales channels, but they will also be devoting engineering resources to optimize Solaris for their servers.
There was also “direction” given that there is a port of Solaris to Zseries (mainframe) that is being developed by a third party with both Sun and IBM’s direct support. However, there was no announcement that this will ever be an official offering, only that both companies have received “significant” customer demand for it, and would like to see it happen.
IBM was more mute on any future plans for a port of Solaris to Power. They acknowledged customer inquiries and suggested that as the two companies’ engineering teams work more closely, things “like that” could end up as a result.
Specifically missing — in fact, the IBM representative commented that it hadn’t even been considered yet — is any work on making sure that IBM Director works well with Solaris on the IBM X86 platform.