Sun's old customer base who were running Solaris x86 on HP or Dell hardware can now breathe a sigh of relief. On July 29, 2010, Oracle announced a new OEM support agreement with Dell and HP to certify, resell, and support Solaris 10 on their x86 hardware.
Earlier in the week, IBM announced it would stop selling Solaris on its BladeCenter and System x rack servers. Before that, there was an announcement from HP that it would stop selling and supporting Solaris as well. Customers on both platforms were worried that they would need to migrate to another operating system such as Linux, AIX, HP-UX, or Windows. However, today's announcement gives a reprieve for Solaris users running on HP or Dell hardware who do not wish to migrate at this time.
Specifically, this new support agreement from Oracle means Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris 10, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, and their associated software support contracts. Owners of Dell and HP servers should look at the operating system support matrix of their hardware to find out if their specific server is certified and supported to run Oracle Solaris 10.
Support for Oracle Solaris 10 on HP ProLiant Servers
According to HP's support matrix for Solaris, customers on HP ProLiant G5, G6, and G7 servers (both DL rackmount ProLiant and BL BladeSystem versions) generally have Solaris 10 support. Those who want support for Oracle Enterprise Linux on HP servers have some HP server options as well.
Support for Oracle Solaris 10 on Dell PowerEdge Servers
For Dell server customers, the Dell support matrix for Solaris shows support for Solaris 10 Update 8 (Solaris U8) on recent rackmount servers such as the Dell PowerEdge R310, R810 and R910. There is support for earlier versions of Solaris on older Dell server hardware. There is considerably less supported hardware for Solaris10 on Dell's blade and tower servers.
How to Get Solaris Technical Support on HP and Dell Servers
Customers who are running Solaris on Dell or HP hardware always go through Dell or HP for their technical support including Oracle Solaris issues. Level 1 and level 2 support calls are handled internally. Level 3 support calls still go through Dell or HP as well, but Oracle can be brought in when necessary. This is the same way it works with OEM support contracts involving Windows and Linux as well.
It's clear from these moves that Oracle intends to continue to support Solaris on x64 hardware from other x86 hardware vendors such as HP and Dell. Despite these positive announcements regarding the future of Solaris x86, the people at OpenSolaris have had zero contact with anyone at Oracle with regards to the future of that project. The folks at OpenSolaris have threatened to disband if a liaison from Oracle isn't appointed by August 16, 2010.
