March 11, 2008 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After taking the first tentative steps toward collaboration last year, Sun Microsystems (sun.com) and Microsoft (microsoft.com) reported yesterday that they are walking hand-in-hand these days, working together on an interoperability test lab in Redmond, Washington.
Sun will contribute servers and storage equipment to the project, which will apparently test interoperability between Windows Server 2008 and Sun Fire x64 systems, which are built on x86 chips, including Intel’s Xeon and AMD’s Opteron chips.
“The center will provide a setting for hands-on testing and tuning of Sun/Microsoft solutions, and will help our joint customers achieve outstanding performance results for their standardized and homegrown solutions,” said Bob Kelly, Microsoft’s corporate VP of infrastructure server marketing, in the company’s press release. “It is consistent with our recently announced interoperability principles, which guide steps that we are taking to enhance interoperability in the marketplace for the benefit of customers.”
The test center’s other objectives will include optimizing Microsoft applications on Sun x64 systems and storage, and promoting full interoperability” in application areas including virtualization, Java technology, systems management and identity.
Reactions online to the announcement have predictably, and sometimes playfully, pointed out Sun’s not-so-long ago opinions about its newfound partner, which included aggressive anti-trust accusations among an arsenal of more general loathing.
Sun’s tune has changed considerably in recent years, however, and relations between the companies have been growing tighter. In September, Sun announced that it would become a Microsoft OEM partner, packing Windows operating systems onto its servers, probably the more astonishing announcement in comparison to yesterday’s, which seems more to follow a trend.
While the original Sun OEM announcement only promised support for Windows Server 2003, despite the impending launch of Server 2008, Sun appears to be on board with supporting the just-released Microsoft server software as well.
It might also be worth paying a visit to the announcement page for the interoperability center on Microsoft’s website. It includes such extra material as a photo of Kelly and Sun VP of systems marketing Lisa Sieker literally cutting the ribbon on the new project, and a fairly informative four-minute video titled Microsoft Interoperability Center Benefits the IT Community.”
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