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

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

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

Sun released Solaris under an open source licence in 2005 and has since logged about 12 million downloads of the server operating system.

Users did not just install the software on servers manufactured by Sun, however. Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz told OpenWorld delegates that about a third of all Solaris installations run on Dell servers.

Schwartz maintained that this had put an end to the 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.' They would look at us and say: 'You obviously don't understand me,'" he said.

IBM became in August 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.