NVIDIA Corp., one of the leading designers of visual technologies for computers, and Sun Microsystems, a large maker of servers and workstations targeting enterprises, signed an agreement to form strategic alliance. Under the agreement the companies will enhance graphics performance and capabilities on workstations made by Sun Micro.

Sun will plug NVIDIA’s range of Quadro FX and NVS graphics cards for extreme performance in 3D applications and solid speed and reliability in 2D software into Sun’s different lineups of workstations running Solaris, Linux or Windows operating systems. Together, Sun and NVIDIA will target customers in graphics and compute intensive markets such as Oil & Gas, Life Sciences, Defense, CAD/CAM, EDA, Financial Services, Professional DCC (Digital Content Creation) and Software Engineering.

“By leveraging Sun’s sales organization and network of channel partners, NVIDIA now has greater access to the industry ecosystem needed to extend its reach with Sun solutions targeted at these market segments,” NVIDIA Corp. said in the statement.

“Sun is committed to delivering NVIDIA technologies with future Sun products, and the two companies are working together to tune and optimize the OpenGL implementation for Solaris on x86 and deliver an open, standards-based development environment,” Sun Microsystems said in the statement.

The first workstations by Sun Microsystems with NVIDIA Quadro family of graphics cards inside are Sun Java Workstations W1100z and W2100z based on AMD Opteron processors.