@Pirate Date: So what exactly does Sun do?
Open Systems!!!
Pirate asks, "Chips from Intel?"
Yep, done that before, but there was no market for it in the past, so the product was discontinued,
Pirate asks, "OS from Red Hat?"
Yep, used BSD UNIX early on. AT&T invested into SUN and Solaris took on SVR4.
Pirate asks, "Sun has sold a huge system just to push their new Infiniband switch and to get a little support $$$?"
Nope, the deal was very significant: server sales, software sales, support sales, massive storage, maintenance revenue... a very nice deal!