Hewlett-Packard Thursday announced that it struck a deal with Linux vendor SuSE to pack that company"s SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on its hardware and support the Linux distribution with its technical support staff.
Businesses will be immediately able to buy HP ProLiant servers equipped with Intel"s Xeon processors configured with SuSE"s Linux, and the pair will later extend the arrangement to servers running off Intel"s Itanium 2 chips, said HP and SuSE in a joint statement.
In addition, customers using SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on HP"s hardware can contact HP"s technical support, which in turn will be backed up by SuSE"s own engineering and product maintenance teams.
This newest partnership between HP and SuSE is the latest in a string of alliances that goes back five years.
SuSE"s server isn"t the only Linux flavour that HP preinstalls on its ProLiant servers. It also offers preconfigured hardware stocked with Linux distributions from Red Hat, The SCO Group, TurboLinux and UnitedLinux.