Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Sun Microsystems announced an alliance to simplify sales, service, and support for customers who run – or can be coaxed to run – Sun’s Solaris 10 operating system on HP’s X86. HP already has the same level of agreement for Microsoft Windows, Novell SUSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, and VMware with their respected vendors. On the other hand Sun had signed similar Solaris distribution deals with IBM and Dell Inc., way back in 2007.

HP and Sun compete each other in the server hardware business, so this move was little unexpected. According to this new partnership HP will distribute and provide support for Solaris 10 on its ProLiant server and blade system platforms. On the top of that this duo has plan to integrate the operating system with HP’s Insight server management software.

But sadly (for Sun) the Solaris deal doesn’t affect HP’s Integrity line of servers, for which HP will still use its own HP-UX operating system. Since this isn’t an exclusive partnership so similar partnership deal with other vendors will not be affected.

The partnership is good news for Sun, with HP’s ProLiant leading the x86 server market at 38.2 per cent factory-revenue share in the fourth quarter of 2008(the IDC report). The deals will also strengthen Solaris position to be a longer-term Unix-variant survivor than any other Unix variant outside the Linux reservation.

How this partnership will affect HP?