Sun warms to Itanium

p>Intel's Itanium chip may get a boost from an unlikely source after Sun Microsystems said it is considering a port of its Solaris operating system for the 64bit processor architecture. This move could make Itanium a more flexible and attractive server option for enterprise IT buyers.

Solaris, a hugely popular variant of Unix, has historically been tied to Sun's Sparc processor family and, to a lesser extent, Intel and AMD processors, but a decision to support Itanium could give the processor more enterprise credibility.

Sun added that it is also considering a Solaris for IBM's Power architecture, although it cautioned that these were not definitive product announcements.

This is not the first time Sun has flirted with Itanium. Even before the chip was released, Sun and Intel had a relationship to create a Solaris for Itanium. But the companies fell out amid mutual recriminations and in 2000 both acknowledged the plans had been scrapped.

However, in a conference call last week, Sun president Jonathan Schwartz said, "Unlike IBM, [which] is really narrowly deploying AIX Unix onto one system family, we've begun looking at delivering Solaris on Power as well as Solaris on Itanium."

Changes of direction have characterised Sun's server announcements recently as the company has supported AMD's Opteron and announced plans to end support for Intel x86 processors before reversing that decision.

Sun has also switched tack on Linux, having endorsed it with its own Sun Linux product and then switched back to support, albeit equivocally, Red Hat and Suse versions. The firm also recently said that Solaris would at some point move to open source.