Sun Microsystems Inc. and EMC Corp. Thursday announced improved compatibility between Sun Solaris 10 and EMC"s storage systems, as well as a new one-call support system that customers can use to get help from either of the vendors. In an announcement Thursday, the two companies said the strategic alliance follows requests from users for just such a move.

"Clearly, this was driven by our customers," said Paul Brown, senior director of alliances at Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC. "We have a large installed base who are using Sun"s products. Our customers were asking us to collaborate" to offer better leverage for their IT investments, he said.

Souheil Saliba, vice president of alliances at Sun, said the two companies have been working together for a long time but that this deal is "significantly taking that relationship forward."

Under the agreement, whose terms aren"t being disclosed, EMC will port many of its software applications for use with Solaris 10, Sun"s Sparc processors and Advanced Micro Devices Inc."s Opteron processors. The applications being ported include EMC PowerPath multipath fail-over software, EMC Documentum enterprise content management software, EMC Legato backup and archiving software, and EMC Smarts network management applications.

The new cooperative support agreement will allow customers to make one call to either Sun or EMC for help, rather than having to call each company individually, Saliba said. That deal takes effect immediately and will be offered to all customers without any changes in support fees. "This is being done for the customers behind the scenes," Brown said.

In a related announcement, Sun said it will now offer the reseller version of EMC Legato NetWorker as its Sun-branded backup and recovery software, according to the two companies.