ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation (headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; President & CEO: Yoichi Okuda; hereinafter, "CTC") will commence sales of Solaris™ on ProLiant, which adopts the x86 HP ProLiant Server series from Hewlett-Packard Japan, Ltd. as Sun Microsystems Inc.'s OS (Unix) Solaris platform, in addition to Sun's range of server products. In three years' time, CTC is aiming to have generated ¥4 billion in sales for its lineup of Solaris on ProLiant products, related middleware and support services.

This combination is already being utilized extensively by customers in their IT systems, particularly in the United States. CTC is an industry pioneer in this field in Japan, and will provide a wide range of formal support. Solaris users can increase options of platforms while efficiently leveraging their existing application assets, thus benefiting from high cost performance of an industry-standard server with the peace of mind provided by the long-established commercial Unix.

Solaris on ProLiant will enable utilization of the operations management tools developed for the field of x86 servers and realize integrated system monitoring and management over multiple server environments, including that of Solaris. In addition to improving operational efficiency and supporting stable system operations, Solaris on ProLiant will also enable integration of a mixed operating systems environment, including Windows and Linux as well as Solaris, to create an IT system more efficient and flexible than ever before through server virtualization achieved by combining HP blade server with VMware vSphere.

Based on its expertise in Sun and HP products that it has cultivated over many years, for customers who are considering an introduction of Solaris on ProLiant, CTC will provide the "24 x 365 Maintenance Service," which will provide the equivalent level of the maintenance service as that provided on SPARC® Solaris 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by collaborating with the HP's Technology Services, as well as provide an "Assessment Service" to support the migration from customers' existing platforms. CTC is able to provide this level of customer support through its 550 Sun-certified Solaris engineers, the largest number of any company in Japan, and its 120 HP-certified ProLiant and Blade System engineers. Similarly, it provides support for VMware virtualization through its 151 VMware-certified engineers.

Solaris on ProLiant—optimized for use with x86 architecture which has been adopted for this combination and constructed using the same source code tree as the well-established SPARC Solaris—realizes the same levels of reliability and stability as the SPARC system on the HP ProLiant Servers. Moreover, users can take advantage of the groundbreaking Solaris functionality—DTrace, ZFS™, Solaris Container, Branded Zone, SMF and its self-recovery function—on the HP ProLiant Servers installed with an Intel® Xeon® processor.

*"Intel," "Xeon" and the Intel logo are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the United States and in other countries.
*Sun, Sun Microsystems, the Sun logo, Solar, ZFS is are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
*All SPARC trademarks are used under license and are trademarks of SPARC international, Inc. in the US and other countries. Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon an architecture developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.

The following comments are from some of CTC's vendor partners (appearing according to Japanese syllabary order).

"Intel welcomes CTC's release of Solaris on ProLiant. We have high hopes that the combination of Solaris and HP ProLiant installed with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500s, which is based on Intel's latest microarchitecture, will provide customers with the performance, functions and reliability they demand and help to create a solid operating environment."
"Oracle Japan is delighted that CTC will launch Solaris on ProLiant. We believe that Oracle's cloud-era next generation IT infrastructure technology when combined with CTC's increased support for the x86 platforms can further contribute to improved company management."
"Symantec welcomes the introduction of Solaris on ProLiant by CTC in Japan. Through a collaborative partnership, CTC and Symantec are able to offer their customers backup and cluster solutions with excellent availability and scalability in large-scale heterogeneous systems, including Solaris. This new combination will deliver greater cost benefits, better reliability, and enhanced management functionality in our local customers' IT environments. "
"Hitachi, Ltd. is very pleased to support CTC's launch of Solaris on ProLiant. JP1, our solution for integrated system operations management, is able to coordinate the monitoring and management of hetero server environments, including x86 Solaris and virtualized environments, and enables our customers' systems to operate in a more efficient and stable manner.
We believe that combining Solaris on ProLiant with JP1 will enable our customers to manage their systems more efficiently and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO)."
"Hewlett-Packard Japan, Ltd. is delighted that CTC will expand its Solaris platform.
We believe that we can help our customers to reduce their costs and increase their investment efficiency, by providing the combination of CTC's strength in system construction and the high cost performance and management capabilities of the HP ProLiant/HP BladeSystem. We will continue to strengthen our collaboration with CTC to provide our customers with both a wide range of choices for their system construction and an integrated IT platform environment."
"Solaris customers have voiced their need for a stable technology infrastructure provider who offers proven solutions, long-term roadmaps and a solid future, CTC's commitment to helping customers deploy Solaris on HP infrastructure will deliver the peace of mind our customers require, along with significant technology and return-on-investment advantages."
"VMware K.K. welcomes the announcement of the launch of Solaris on ProLiant by CTC.
VMware vSphere 4 offers over fifty types of OS options including x86 Solaris 10—more than any other virtualization solution.
We are confident that this release of Solaris on ProLiant will, through the integration of not only Solaris 10 but also other OS such as Windows Server or Linux on vSphere, improve the efficiency of customers' IT resources, offer them greater control over those resources, and provide a flexible and 'Always On IT' environment.
Going forward, we will aim for 100% virtualization and further collaborate with CTC in order to focus on making effective use of customers' IT resources and maintaining and improving business operations."