Yesterday Oracle announced that Dell and HP will certify and resell Oracle Solaris, Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM on their respective x86 platforms. What wasn't clear from this was how this affects other vendors.

Well, I can confirm this offering covers ALL Solaris certified non-Sun hardware that is listed on the HCL too, regardless of the manufacturer. A quick glance of the HCL shows it covers a broad selection of HP, Dell, IBM, and Fujitsu systems among others. If you have a system that isn't on the list, and you need support for it, contact the vendor of the hardware, refer them to the Hardware Certification Test Suite page and ask them to get it certified.

Support for all certified systems is offered on a per-socket subscription basis with pricing currently set at $1000 per socket for 1 to 4 sockets and $2000 per socket for 5 or more sockets. So a 1 socket system will cost $1000 per year, 2 socket systems $2000 per year, 4 socket systems $4000 per year, and 8 socket system $16000 per year. As this is a subscription, it is a per-year agreement and bundles Premier Support (24x7) plus a production deployment license valid so long as the subscription is maintained (e.g. if you end your subscription, you can no longer run that system in production).

Customers will be able to purchase the subscriptions directly from Oracle or an official Oracle reseller. Regardless of how they get the subscription, support comes directly from Oracle for both front line and back line.

For those interested, customers with Sun hardware get a bundled perpetual license with the hardware and will pay only 8% or 12% of the net systems price for support. Over time this may prove to be more cost effective than purchasing non-Sun hardware and it also comes with the added bonus that Solaris is actually fully tested and developed on Sun hardware with full support for Solaris's Predictive Self Healing technology and the confidence that Sun/Oracle won't switch out components mid-stream that don't have Solaris driver support after certification.

So if you've been holding off purchasing a support contract for your third party hardware, or holding off updating your third party hardware due to fears of Oracle ditching Solaris, cutting off third party vendors or you just wanted to hold out for all the FUD to be disproved, you can now rest in the safe knowledge that Solaris support on certified third party hardware will continue to be offered and can be bought directly from Oracle.