Dell: Solaris not a standard
Judy Chavis has stated that Dell won’t look at supporting, or providing, Solaris on their equipment until Solaris becomes the next industry standard OS - I quote from here:
“Is it the next industry standard around operating systems? That’s what it would take for us to do that,” she said. So far, the answer is a definitive no. “Since the year started, I haven’t had a Solaris x86 customer come into the briefing center,” Chavis said.
Solaris may not be the next industry standard around operating systems, but it’s hardly a small player in the market. I’d very surprised if Dell don’t have to compete head on with Solaris in the datacenter, whether you are comparing Linux on both platforms (and I include Sun’s AMD platforms in that comparison).
Ironically, the article goes on to say:
Dell evaluated Unix years ago, including Solaris, but eventually chose to stick with Linux.
Dell, however, have hardly made their love of Linux hugely public. For months, possibly years, after their decision getting Linux for your Dell was hard. Getting Linux on your desktop on Dell can be even harder.
Still, the real issue is how seriously companies are willing to take Solaris. It’s still popular in the datacenter, albeit on SPARC or dedicated Sun x86/AMD hardware. Although Solaris x86 - almost dumped by Sun - is proving to be very popular, especially with the release of OpenSolaris.
Solaris is obviously not a standard, but as I’ve argued before, Solaris has a lot more standardization, and for a lot longer, than Linux.
Standardization or not, it seems odd that Dell do not wish to support an OS that would enable them to compete on at least similar terms with Sun’s own hardware, although Dell don’t yet like AMD.