There's nothing like being a little down to bring out the thug in the competition. As Sun desperately seeks a business partner, it's discovering that others are busy using uncertainty to prize more and more customers away from it. The latest company to jump on the bandwagon is Dell who is offering Sun Solaris customers a migration path to Dell hardware.

As part of the pitch Dell is telling Sun customers "Dell PowerEdge Servers with Solaris runs 14 times faster than Sun Fire with Solaris for database applications". This claim is based on a test report from Principled Technologies that Dell commissioned to look at the costs of running Oracle on Solaris using both Sun Fire and PowerEdge servers.

The main push from Dell is around its latest Intel Nehalem based solutions and it is offering not just blade servers but also rack and tower servers as well. This is not just a hardware play for Dell. It is offering migration services through its Global Infrastructure Consulting Services division.

This move puts Dell into competition with both IBM and HP who have both been wooing Sun customers and winning business over the last two years. The success of IBM and HP has been their use of Quick Transit from Transitive. QuickTransit is a cross platform virtualisation solution that allows applications written for one platform to be run in a virtual machine running on a different platform.

Transitive was acquired by IBM back in December 2008 and is one of the technologies IBM is expected to use, should it buy Sun, in order to migrate Sparc/Solaris customers to IBM's own hardware. Dell is not saying if it has bought a licence from IBM to use QuickTransit or whether it is planning to use other technologies to migrate Sparc/Solaris customers to its x86 hardware.

Dell is providing potential customers access to its Server Power and Space Savings Calculator which will allow customers to input their existing hardware and see what savings they will make by moving to Dell.

Dell is also making available a set of migration guides that can be used to walk customers through their migration from any RISC platform to Dell's x86 systems.