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At least one of creators of ZFS were formerly interns at Netapp in the WAFL group with free access to WAFL source code. See: http://blogs.sun.com/ahrens/

      http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/what_we_did

DISCLAIMER: I work for sun.. Know nothing about the cat fight though ;-)

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/on_patent_trol ling

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/on_patent_trol ling

At the blog of Sun's CEO Jonatan Schwartz, there is his version of the story. "Sun did not approach NetApps about licensing any of Sun's patents and never filed complaints against NetApps or demanded anything".

NetApp says SUN's lawyers forced them into a corner and tried to extort license fees

SUN says that NetApp tried to force the patents from them first and they boo-booed them.

Ah... we might not know who did what first, but I'm definitely annoyed that the lawsuite between two CALIFORNIAN companies is filed in TEXAS court by NetApp... no prizes for guessing that that court is a haven for patent trolls, so I'm more inclined to believe Sun's story here.

NetApp has been around for a very loooooooong time. Almost as long as Sun.

If "almost as long as" is defined as "about 2/3s as long as". Sun: 25 years. NetApp: 15 years.

...it loses the chance to get an awesome FS.

ZFS beats the hell out of EXT3:

http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/solaris10/ zfs_linux.pdf

If they were serious about the whole standards thing, they could just add real ODF support. Then they could simply put out MS Office that worked with ODF, and most people and businesses would STILL buy it, even with alternatives available.

Sun already did that for them. (ODF pligin for MS Office).

You haven't been watching Adobe if you think Microsoft is doing this just to compete with Flash. Adobe is planning on turning Flash into a complete OS-independent application delivery platform. (The Adobe rep insisted this included Linux when asked.)

The best example of a similar technology is Java Web Start. Adobe has the install base to push a new version of Flash to enough end users to get a large enough user base to really try something like this. Continuing the analogy with Java, Flash currently fills the Java Applet niche, and Adobe wants to move into the Java Web Start niche.

Microsoft wants that market, which is the point behind XAML and other technologies. Silverlight is simply Microsoft firing back at Adobe. They both see a future in rich applications delivered over the web, and are both competing for that market. Silverlight is just one part of that - both hope to get web developers hooked on their platform, to support their rich application delivery framework.

Since that's the point, you can expect Microsoft to support cross-platform Silverlight as long as Adobe supports cross-platform Flash. They're both hoping to slide into a new market using Flash-like technology.

So you work for IBM or Sun? Virtual presence, its not just for furries yiffing anymore. d:

What shared/global filesystem and clustering solution will Sun be providing to compete with Linux' free and relatively-mature clustering?

Clustering: "Sun Microsystems will contribute to the community the source code for Solaris Cluster, Sun's commercial HA Cluster product group, under the name "Open High Availability Cluster.""

Shared file system: "Sun also plans to open source additional storage code over the next several months, including: ... QFS Sun's shared file system software delivers significant scalability, data management, and throughput for the most data-intensive applications. Well known today in the traditional high performance computing (HPC) arena, QFS is increasingly being used in commercial environments that require multiple host, high speed access to large data repositories."

Both have been commercial products for a long time and are quite mature.

According to Johnathan Schwartz of Sun
".. Java runs on more devices than Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, Symbian and the Mac combined. Nearly 4 billion devices at this point, from smart cards to consumer devices, DVD players to set top boxes, medical equipment, all the way up into the majority of the world's transactional systems and 8 out of every 10 cellphones sold."
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/fueling_the_ne twork_effect

It works sure, but it is no where close to a Windows desktop, and far behind Linux Desktops. You would think they would have solved printing in some nice way but not even that is available.

Though their Sun Ray clients are easy on the administrator and the best on the market, you just got to love a thin client with two monitors at 1920x1200 (Sun Ray 2FS). They are also pretty ceap $200 - $600.

You shouldn't complain on what you clearly don't know anything about.

A question for you: What is it about OS X that makes it good for audio/video/graphic work? That's your assertion, so I assume you have at least of some reason to believe it.

If you're confused as to why some choose OS X then I would suggest doing some research into the features that made NEXTSTEP a compelling Unix Desktop and workstation in the 90s. For instance:

• Why Tim Berners-Lee chose NEXTSTEP as the platform on which to develop the world's first Web Browser and Web Server.
• Why id Software chose NEXTSTEP to develop their landmark Doom and Quake games for the PC.
• What's compelling about NEXTSTEP/Cocoa APIs, Interface Builder, and what influence did Objective-C have on Java?
• Why were Linux users so enthusiastic about NEXTSTEP-derived window managers, such as WindowMaker and AfterStep? What lead to the development of GNUStep?

That's NEXTSTEP.

Now, say you chose NEXTSTEP as the basis for your perfect operating system and desktop environment. You get to keep all of the good design decisions, throw away or refactor all of the bad design decisions, and do it without any backward compatibility restrictions. What you end up with is OS X.

But why an Apple laptop? Here's why: I can open up a bunch of SSH and X11 sessions to a remote server over wi-fi, close the lid and throw it in my back-pack, go eat lunch, come back and open the lid, and all of my remote X11 apps and sessions are still alive. OS X just works damn well on Apple's laptop hardware.

Personally, I'd focus on Multimedia authoring, it's always been Linux's weak point.

First, audio composition and editing, as well as a Virtual DJ studio. The backend (ALSA + Jack) is brilliant, but the lack of synths, mixers and whatnot of the caliber of Absynth and Traktor (from Native Instruments) and Live (from Ableton) makes ALSA/Jack fairly useless.

raster graphics. As much as people keep repeating that Gimp is as complete as Photoshop, it isn't. CMYK support, 24 and 32-bit colour support, support for excessively large files, better tablet support, are all very much needed in a bitmap editor. I'd certainly throw much resources in Mr. kanzelsberger's direction, for work on Pixel Editor, which is a truly brilliant application.

Vector graphics. There really hasn't been a truly top-tier vector drawing application for Linux since Corel Draw 9 was briefly ported. Inkscape is neat, but it's far, far more useful as a GUI frontend to SVG editing than a full fledged Vector drawing application. Xara Xtreme has promise and potential, the Windows version of Xara was ever even quite close to being on par with Illustrator, Freehand, or Corel Draw, but it has promise and it's probably the best bet right now.

Stephane has for a long time presented a weak case against OpenOffice XML.

"1) Self-exploding spreadsheets"

His top issue "1) Self-exploding spreadsheets" has been discussed on Brian Jones' weblog:

http://blogs.msdn.com/brian_jones/archive/2007/08/ 15/why-there-s-no-microsoft-in-open-xml.aspx

It boils down to: the fact that is XML does not mean that you can modify it in any way you want; There are rules for modifying the schema and Mr Stephane is not happy with that. Had he followed the actual rules he would have had no issue.

This is a case where two locations must be updated per the spec; He can avoid updating the two locations by removing the chainCalc.xml file (which is optional, and Excel will reconstruct). He later gets upset because if he does that, he claims performance on load will be slower.

"2) Entered versus stored values"

His second point in "2) Entered versus stored values" in an interesting distinction between entered values and stored values. It reflects the way that Excel works (and so does Gnumeric) by storing the values instead of the data that was entered by the user. This responds to the need of the spreadsheet to do something interesting with the data, for example when you enter a date, it is stored as a number with a format applied not as a string. This allows computations on dates to happen based on the underlying numeric value. The featured is used extensively by spreadsheets.

In the Excel/gnumeric case you have to generate a single value, in the ODF case you must generate and update the two values (which just a point before, Stephane was having a seizure about).

The precision issue that he brings up, I suspect is merely an issue with double format precision. He claims that the data is unusable and there is a loss of precision, but handing that out to a C compiler will produce the expected result with no loss of precision. I do not know how "atof" or the compiler work internally to cope with this issue, but at least my libc/gcc combo does not have this problem.

I would not be surprised if this is an artifact of floating point, someone with more background on doubles and floating point math could probably answer the question with more authority, but a cursory read of "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating Point" seems to validate that there is no error in the floating point representation for the values that he uses: http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h tml

3) Optimization artefacts become a feature instead of an embarrasment

His 3rd point is open for debate, like the 1st case, we have a case where he has to handle things differently. Stephane sells a commercial product to handle Excel files and I suspect that his product has to cope with the same patterns in different ways, which has naturally upset him. OOXML might be inspired by Excel's needs, but it does not mean that it has to be a 1-to-1 match.

4) VML isn't XML

VML is labeled as "deprecated" in the OOXML documentation (Section 8.6.2, page 25) and it states: "The VML format is a legacy format originally introduced with Office 2000 and is included and fully defined in this Standard for backwards compatibility reasons. The DrawingML format is a newer and richer format created with the goal of eventually replacing any uses of VML in the Office Open XML formats. VML should be considered a deprecated format included in Office Open XML for legacy reasons only and new applications that need a file format for drawings are strongly encouraged to use preferentially DrawingML."

So the standard basically says "VML is still in use, but its better to use DrawingML". Stephane misconstrues the above statement and tries to portray this as evil

People who really do mission-critical computing go for IBM big iron and/or SUN hardware. They have redundancy capacity as crazy as build in redundant motherboards. Mommy, can I borrow 300,000 for a new server? http://www.sun.com/servers/index.jsp?cat=Sun%20Fir e%20High-end%20Servers&tab=3 I want one for my new workstation!

Actually, no. Jonathan Schwartz says it stands for Stanford University Network Workstation.

Quote: "I don't think Java is a particularly big reason for people to like Sun, and tying your company's future to it seems ill-advised."

Exactly. The name change is evidence that Sun has some very technically ignorant marketing people, apparently, or maybe just a very technically ignorant, but imperial, CEO.

My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

From Wikipedia's Criticism of Java: "The look and feel of GUI applications written in Java using the Swing platform is often different from native applications." It seems to me that the average person's experience of Java is that programs written in it are slow and funky, not a good advertisement for a large company.

Eventually, Java will be completely open source. It is not now. Once it is open source, Sun loses control. Does Sun want to lose control of a symbol it is using for its company?

Java is an Indonesian island of 124 million, the most populous island in the world and one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. There have been political problems there in the past. If there are problems there in the future, the word Java will be in the news. More than 90 percent of Javanese are Muslims. Does Sun intend to involve the company with the uncertain future of a Muslim island?

I will now quote someone who considers himself an authority, the CEO of Sun: "Granted, lots of folks on Wall Street know SUNW, given its status as among the most highly traded stocks in the world (the SUNW symbol shows up daily in the listings of most highly traded securities)." -- From the August 23, 2007 badly formatted article linked by Slashdot, Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, written by Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz.

Mr. Swartz, are you an imperial CEO like Gerald Levin of AOL Time Warner? (Time Warner's merging itself into AOL is considered the worst business decision of all time. The company immediately lost $88 Billion.) Mr. Levin called himself an "imperial CEO", meaning that he made decisions without consulting other people.

Mr. Swartz, if you don't have enough technical knowledge even to format your own web page, are you technically knowledgeable enough to run Sun? From the biography on Sun's web site: "Schwartz received degrees in economics and mathematics from Wesleyan University."

I don't believe it will actually happen, but if it does, by changing away from the strong brand of SUNW, known for serious servers, to a brand largely outside its control, Sun will weaken its position in the marketplace, in my opinion.

I don't think it is wise for technically knowledgeable people to work for companies managed by people with little or no technical knowledge. When technically ignorant managers try to run technically-oriented companies, a lot of unpredictable, weird things happen. Why take the risk?

Quote: "I don't think Java is a particularly big reason for people to like Sun, and tying your company's future to it seems ill-advised."

Exactly. The name change is evidence that Sun has some very technically ignorant marketing people, apparently, or maybe just a very technically ignorant, but imperial, CEO.

My understanding is that Sun does not allow its own programmers to use Java for important programs because Java is bytecode interpreted, not compiled. That makes Java easy to de-compile. Sun apparently designed the language for other people to use. Microsoft did the same with C#; apparently none of the programs Microsoft sells are written in C#.

Examples of Java de-compilers:
Jad - the fast JAva Decompiler
DJ Java Decompiler
Jode
JReversePro
SourceTec Java Decompiler

From Wikipedia's Criticism of Java: "The look and feel of GUI applications written in Java using the Swing platform is often different from native applications." It seems to me that the average person's experience of Java is that programs written in it are slow and funky, not a good advertisement for a large company.

Eventually, Java will be completely open source. It is not now. Once it is open source, Sun loses control. Does Sun want to lose control of a symbol it is using for its company?

Java is an Indonesian island of 124 million, the most populous island in the world and one of the most densely populated regions on Earth. There have been political problems there in the past. If there are problems there in the future, the word Java will be in the news. More than 90 percent of Javanese are Muslims. Does Sun intend to involve the company with the uncertain future of a Muslim island?

I will now quote someone who considers himself an authority, the CEO of Sun: "Granted, lots of folks on Wall Street know SUNW, given its status as among the most highly traded stocks in the world (the SUNW symbol shows up daily in the listings of most highly traded securities)." -- From the August 23, 2007 badly formatted article linked by Slashdot, Jonathan Schwartz's Weblog: The Rise of JAVA - The Retirement of SUNW, written by Sun CEO Jonathan Swartz.

Mr. Swartz, are you an imperial CEO like Gerald Levin of AOL Time Warner? (Time Warner's merging itself into AOL is considered the worst business decision of all time. The company immediately lost $88 Billion.) Mr. Levin called himself an "imperial CEO", meaning that he made decisions without consulting other people.

Mr. Swartz, if you don't have enough technical knowledge even to format your own web page, are you technically knowledgeable enough to run Sun? From the biography on Sun's web site: "Schwartz received degrees in economics and mathematics from Wesleyan University."

I don't believe it will actually happen, but if it does, by changing away from the strong brand of SUNW, known for serious servers, to a brand largely outside its control, Sun will weaken its position in the marketplace, in my opinion.

I don't think it is wise for technically knowledgeable people to work for companies managed by people with little or no technical knowledge. When technically ignorant managers try to run technically-oriented companies, a lot of unpredictable, weird things happen. Why take the risk?

Sun Microsystems is going to make a killing over the next couple years. Say what you will about "red-shift" and all their other hokey marketese, they definitely got ahead of the curve when it comes to the idea that power, cooling and infrastructure costs and going to become limiting factors on business growth in the coming decades.

Nobody would release a CPU made of 64 cores at 14MHz and then claim that it was a 900MHz CPU. That is so retarded that even the most suicidal marketing department would balk at the idea.

Let me introduce you to Sun:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/sun_enters_the _commodity_silicon

"We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week - delivering 89.6 Ghz of parallel computing power on a single chip" -- From 8 cores running @ 1.4 GHz each. Where does the 89.6 come from? He multiplies the FULL speed by the number of hardware threads (8 per core).

Yes, 11.2 actual GHz becomes 89.6 for marketing purposes. The other 78.4 is waiting around in case it ever gets to run across 8 dimensions of time at once, with Buckaroo Bonzai and the Hong Kong Cavaliers.

I agree completely and I approached OSI at OSCON with a view to OSI creating a definition of just such a patent covenant (having Sun create it unilaterally is unlikely to be welcomed by IBM and Microsoft!). My first attempt at an outline was in my blog posting on the subject and I hope the OSI Board will commission a group next month.

Given that Sun's ODF plug-in for MS Word does exactly that (simply adds ODF to the list of supported formats everywhere they occur in Word, including allowing it to be set as the default), it makes me wonder why Microsoft would say that.

I don't normally respond to trolls, but I want to make sure this is clear. Despite the claims of Microsoft's representatives, their patent covenant is not the same as Sun's. There are several important differences, as I pointed out at the time:

1. Microsoft make their promise contingent on the patents being "essential", at their sole judgement, to the implementation involved. There may be several ways to implement each feature; if you happen to pick the one covered by the patent, you are using one that's not "essential" since you could be implementing one of the alternative ways. You can't know this without extensive research and legal advice.
2. They also make it contingent on "conformance", again at their sole discretion. Partial implementations may be at risk, and since open source development is done in public, so may in-progress full implementations.
3. Thirdly, despite placing these limitations on their outward grant, they expect all recipients of the grants to refrain from all litigation, not just that bounded by either conformance or essential claims.

Items 1 and 2 are especially important. By reserving unaccountable judgement over what is and is not covered, they prevent implementors having certainty they will not face patent issues. This is exactly the way to chill the enthusiasm of open source developers, for whom certainty over their freedoms is the cornerstone of community. It's exactly the reason I made sure Sun's covenant was not crippled in the same way.

I have now had several reports of Microsoft's representatives claiming their covenant is the same as Sun's; it is not, please make sure anyone who says so is challenged.

There's one more issue of note, which the NZ paper makes clear. Microsoft explicitly uses proprietary formats within their MS-OOXML specification (DrawingML for example). If they want to provide comfort to open source developers, they need to go further and cover all referenced formats with their "promise" as well.

I don't normally respond to trolls, but I want to make sure this is clear. Despite the claims of Microsoft's representatives, their patent covenant is not the same as Sun's. There are several important differences, as I pointed out at the time:

1. Microsoft make their promise contingent on the patents being "essential", at their sole judgement, to the implementation involved. There may be several ways to implement each feature; if you happen to pick the one covered by the patent, you are using one that's not "essential" since you could be implementing one of the alternative ways. You can't know this without extensive research and legal advice.
2. They also make it contingent on "conformance", again at their sole discretion. Partial implementations may be at risk, and since open source development is done in public, so may in-progress full implementations.
3. Thirdly, despite placing these limitations on their outward grant, they expect all recipients of the grants to refrain from all litigation, not just that bounded by either conformance or essential claims.

Items 1 and 2 are especially important. By reserving unaccountable judgement over what is and is not covered, they prevent implementors having certainty they will not face patent issues. This is exactly the way to chill the enthusiasm of open source developers, for whom certainty over their freedoms is the cornerstone of community. It's exactly the reason I made sure Sun's covenant was not crippled in the same way.

I have now had several reports of Microsoft's representatives claiming their covenant is the same as Sun's; it is not, please make sure anyone who says so is challenged.

There's one more issue of note, which the NZ paper makes clear. Microsoft explicitly uses proprietary formats within their MS-OOXML specification (DrawingML for example). If they want to provide comfort to open source developers, they need to go further and cover all referenced formats with their "promise" as well.

No it doesn't. This FUD has been addressed long ago. http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/raising_the_bar _on_patents

Backed by Sun funding. Lazy first-relevant-hit-on-Google-sourcing: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/sun_microsyste ms_engineering_joins_porting

Sun may be taking this chance to drop out of the server markett

``As many are already aware, we embarked upon a journey a couple years ago to formally separate the Solaris operating system from Sun's hardware business - as well as bring Solaris to the free and open source software world via a community effort named OpenSolaris. None of these changes were easy, but I'd like to believe both were successful. What's my proof?`` Read the rest in Sun CEO's blog.

While I agree that complex configuration files are a bane to development, I disagree with the assertion that J2EE requires them. ORM technologies like JPA are utilizing Java 5 annotations to declare configuration inline with code instead of XML. Frameworks like Wicket and GWT are providing developers with Java solutions to UI that are devoid of XML configuration, JSP, and markup-heavy implementations. IMHO, Wicket deserves to be called a breath of fresh air.

I do think it's a mistake for J2EE to include a particular view framework in its specification. JSF, while an innovation in the 90's, is simply a pig wearing lipstick compared to some of the new frameworks out there. Frameworks that, for example, are built on AJAX instead of including it as an afterthought.

I suppose the bewildering set of choices may be the root of the problem here. But if you make the effort to do your research, you'll find that many of your assumptions are incorrect.

Easy enough to answer your question.

http://www.sun.com/software/star/openoffice/faq.xm l

Q: What are the differences between StarOffice 8 software and the OpenOffice.org 2.0?
A: StarOffice 8 software is a commercial product built on OpenOffice.org's open source code to provide the best value, multi-platform Microsoft compatible office suite aimed at organizations and consumers. OpenOffice.org 2.0 is the leading open-source project aimed at users of free software, independent developers and the open source community. StarOffice includes licensed-in, third-party technology such as:

• Spellchecker and thesaurus
• Mail Merge Wizard does not have the ability to send mail merge documents as emails.
• Select fonts including Windows metrically equivalent fonts and Asian language fonts
• Select filters, including Asian word processor filters
• Integration of additional templates and extensive clipart gallery
• Migration Tools and Macro Migration Wizard. The converted macros does not run in OpenOffice.org
• Sun Java System Configuration Manager for Solaris, Linux and Windows.

In addition to product differences, StarOffice offers:

• Updates/upgrades on CD
• Sun installation and user documentation
• 24x7 Web based support for enterprises and consumers
• Help desk support
• Warranties and indemnification guarantee Training
• Professional services for migration and deployment

... because, after all, ZFS is being closely held as proprietary code that can't be used in ... oh, oh, wait.....

This isn't targeted at home users, it's targeted at business users. Sure, home users are welcome to use it too, and importing/exporting Word and Excel is generally good enough in that case. The StarOffice migration tools are very business-oriented:

http://www.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/enterp rise_tools.jsp#Setup

The big one from that list is the macro migration wizard. There's also an analysis wizard that examines your documents and calculates migration costs and risks. For a business with thousands, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of MS Office documents, these kinds of tools are essential. If the users (or worse, the IT department) had to manually migrate their MS Office docs to ODF, the project would be dead right there. That could be a deal-breaker even in a small business, and certainly is for a large business.

Definitely. They were in it to kill Linux.

Sun holds a non-exclusive license from Xerox to the Xerox Graphical User Interface, which license also covers Sun's licensees who implement OPEN LOOK GUIs and otherwise comply with Sun's written license agreements.

As a result of this settlement, the Java community, our customers, licensees and shareholders, have now been freed from worrying about Kodak's litigation. We paid $92M (not $82M) to protect our constituents from their lawyers. Do we believe their patents are invalid? Yes (just crack a Smalltalk textbook). Was it worth having this suit hang over our heads, no. Absolutely not. That's why we settled - not to validate Kodak, not to validate those patents, but to let our customers and employees and stockholders focus on market opportunity, not litigation.

Definitely. They were in it to kill Linux.

Sun holds a non-exclusive license from Xerox to the Xerox Graphical User Interface, which license also covers Sun's licensees who implement OPEN LOOK GUIs and otherwise comply with Sun's written license agreements.

As a result of this settlement, the Java community, our customers, licensees and shareholders, have now been freed from worrying about Kodak's litigation. We paid $92M (not $82M) to protect our constituents from their lawyers. Do we believe their patents are invalid? Yes (just crack a Smalltalk textbook). Was it worth having this suit hang over our heads, no. Absolutely not. That's why we settled - not to validate Kodak, not to validate those patents, but to let our customers and employees and stockholders focus on market opportunity, not litigation.

See the Solaris 10 HCL - in particular the OEM vendors page:

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/sol/systems/v iews/oem_and_system_vendor_products_all_results.pa ge1.html

There is plenty of Compaq/HP gear on there, not to mention IBM BladeChassis machines etc. Probably not that interesting for
those on a budget or the slasddot "my whitebox is teh leet" crowd, but for real IT shops it is a reasonable list.

Sun provide a device detection tool which will scan your hardware and should give you an idea of if drivers are available for the various bits of your system.

http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/hcts/device_detect .html

Now, here is a funny thing: an exploitable buffer overflow was recently found in the native library handling images in Sun's JVM. This is one of the most significant security bug found in this JVM for the past few years.

Programs in Java are more secure than programs in native code, but only as long as they don't rely on native libraries ...

Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List

Solaris Express Developer Edition (OpenSolaris, basically) Hardware Compatibility List

And just because it's not on there doesn't mean it won't run Solaris.

Solaris 10 Hardware Compatibility List

Solaris Express Developer Edition (OpenSolaris, basically) Hardware Compatibility List

And just because it's not on there doesn't mean it won't run Solaris.

HP: http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/cache/492635- 0-0-0-121.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

EBS supporting IBM x86: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/07/sun_ibm_eb s/

OF course, you can always check Sun's HCL, to see whose systems they will support...
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/