All of your leading hardware manufacturers offer their enterprise computers with a variety of operating systems. Hewlett Packard's ProLiant servers support a variety of operating systems, including Windows (2008, 2003, 2000), Linux (Red Hat, Novell SUSE, Oracle Enterprise Linux), and Solaris. Dell offers similar choices (except that I couldn't find Oracle Enterprise Linux on the Dell website.) IBM also supports a variety of operating system, including Windows, Linux (Red Hat, Novell SUSE, Oracle Enterprise Linux), and of course AIX.
So what about Sun? I couldn't find any nice neat summary for Sun's server support, so I chose a server at random - in this case, the Sun Fire X2200 M2 Server - to see what it supported. Based upon my two seconds of experience with this server, I can tell you that it's a 64-bit server that can be placed in a computing cluster, supports AMD Quad-Core processors, and can support up to 64 GB of memory. In other words, JezzBall will REALLY fly on this thing.
So what operating systems does my new favorite computer support? Solaris, both Red Hat and SUSE (no Oracle explicitly listed), Windows, and Ubuntu.
Assuming that Oracle's acquisition of Sun is successful, one would expect that Oracle Enterprise Linux may begin to pop up on Sun servers. Or perhaps not:
With Sun in tow, Oracle will now finally have its own operating system with Solaris, instead of just its own Oracle Enterprise Linux (which is based on Red Hat).
So should Oracle re-brand the Sun software as Oracle Enterprise Solaris? And would the Offshore Engineering Society bark about the name?
And what in the heck is Sunoracle going to do with Ubuntu? Bundle it with MySQL for a complete solution?
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