Yesterday Sun announced an agreement with Intel to start selling Intel based servers, and in turn Intel is now considering Solaris the “mission critical UNIX OS for Intel Xeon” servers. This doesn’t seem to be going to have an impact on their AMD server business which is growing rapidly. This is however going to breath some life into their Solaris OS. Solaris has suffered, in my opinion, due to a few key factors.

A.) The relative lower cost of Intel processors when compared to Sun’s Sparc base systems.

B.) The aggressive marketing of Microsoft’s Windows which drove many Operating Systems into non-existance.

C.) The adoption of Linux into what could have been an X86 UNIX market.

The Sun announcement stated:

“January 22, 2007 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Intel Corporation today announced a broad strategic alliance centered on Intel’s endorsement of the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Sun’s commitment to deliver a comprehensive family of enterprise and telecommunications servers and workstations based on Intel Xeon processors. The new Intel-based enterprise systems from Sun will enhance its current X64 portfolio and complement its industry-leading, powerhouse SPARC systems.

As part of today’s announcement, Intel is embracing Solaris as a mainstream OS and the enterprise-class, mission critical UNIX OS for Intel Xeon processor-based servers. In a joint press conference in San Francisco today, executives from both companies announced a Solaris OEM agreement enabling Intel to distribute and support the Solaris OS to its customers as market opportunities arise.”

My buddy the Lone Sys Admin thought that:

“This also looks like Sun and Intel snubbing Linux, underhandedly deeming it not mission-critical. If this has the effect of rallying the Linux camp to clean up the rough edges then it will be worth the snubbing. I have plenty of mission-critical stuff running on Linux, and it does just fine. This reminds me of IBM’s treatment of Linux, where they were Linux-crazy for a while, but eventually remembered that AIX is their mission-critical UNIX. It’s all fun and games until someone gets the GPL out.”

What does this mean? Well, AMD lost their place as the only X86 chip sold by Sun, and Solaris gets a new chance.