First Linux, now Solaris.

Dell has vowed to support Sun Microsystems' Solaris operating system on its servers, executives for the two companies revealed at the Oracle Open World conference in San Francisco.

"We are going to work together to provide support for Solaris," Dell chief executive Michael Dell said.

Customers will be able to order servers bundled with the operating system from the Dell website.

Sun in 2005 released Solaris under an open source licence and has since logged about 12m downloads of the server operating system. Users however wouldn't just install the software on servers manufactured by Sun. Speaking at the Oracle conference, Schwartz said that about one third of all Solaris installations run on Dell servers.

That reality made an end to the past marketing wars between Sun and Dell.

"The stupidest thing we could have done was go to those customers and say: 'You blew it. You made a mistake.'"

"Then they would look at us and say: 'You obviously don't understand me.'"

IBM in August was the first tier one server vendor to support Solaris. Schwartz also touted Sun's interoperability partnership with Microsoft, which aims to ensure that Windows and Solaris servers can work together in the data centre.