Sun Microsystems just bought a large storage company, StorageTek, for $4.1 billion. Now it has announced a new agreement with industry giant EMC Corporation.

The gist of the agreement is that the companies will work on compatibility between the EMC's networked storage platforms and Sun's Solaris 10 Operating System (OS). EMC also intends to port key storage management software to Solaris 10, including EMC PowerPath and EMC Legato NetWorker, as well as software from its EMC Documentum, EMC Legato and EMC Smarts product families.

Once these efforts are complete, EMC and Sun customers will be able to cost-effectively manage, protect and share information, using EMC storage systems and software with Solaris 10 OS on both SPARC and AMD Opteron x64 processor-based systems.

"The needs of customers must always come first and with this collaboration, our companies are taking another step to prove that," said Howard Elias, Executive Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Office of Technology at EMC. "As Sun delivers Solaris 10 across multiple platforms, EMC will be a key enabler for our joint customers to deploy it as part of an information lifecycle management strategy that drives efficiencies and productivity and helps reduce the total cost of ownership for information technology and business operations."

                                
EMC's Howard Elias                                     Sun's Jonathan
                                                                           Schwartz

"With Sun's growth in the x64 server space, there is increased demand for the most storage enabled OS on the market, Solaris 10," said Jonathan Schwartz, President and Chief Operating Officer at Sun. "Sun believes that customers deserve choice when making their IT decisions. We provide that choice through Sun's own complete line of data management and storage technologies, partnering with leading vendors like EMC, and leadership in open standards. Customers expect our companies to be working closely together to take care of their most critical issues and we are delighted to collaborate with EMC on support for Solaris 10, and look forward to continuing to grow the overall market."

In two additional developments, Sun and EMC have initiated a new, expanded Cooperative Support Agreement and have extended an agreement that enables Sun to offer the OEM version of EMC Legato NetWorker as its Sun-branded backup and recovery software. The expanded Cooperative Support Agreement provides assurances to customers that their support questions will be mutually handled by Sun and EMC. The expanded agreement will also leverage the work the two companies are conducting related to Solaris 10 OS.

The extended OEM agreement "builds on a longstanding relationship between Sun and Legato and enables Sun to continue offering the EMC software as Sun StorEdge Enterprise Backup Software," according to Sun.