HP and Sun Microsystems expanded a partnership to make Sun's Solaris a key operating system for HP Proliant servers.

HP will distribute and provide software technical support for Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System on the ProLiant server and blade system platforms.

Sun also becomes a strategic HP ProLiant OS distribution partner and Solaris is now elevated to the lineup of key operating environments for the HP ProLiant platform. HP also will increase its participation in the OpenSolaris community, collaborating with other users on feature development and interoperability.

"We're responding to our customers who have asked for expanded HP ProLiant operating environment support to address their diverse application requirements," said Mark Potter, senior vice president and general manager, BladeSystem and Insight Software, HP. "The combination of Solaris and HP ProLiant delivers superior performance, scalability and virtualization capabilities on x86 servers."

"The endorsement of Solaris on HP ProLiant dramatically expands the available market for Solaris on x86 servers, building on the largest installed-base of any commercial UNIX and Linux distribution," said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Sun Microsystems.

HP ProLiant customers who prefer Solaris on x86 now have access to a complete infrastructure solution for the data center from a single source, the company said.