The Wall Street Journal reported today that IBM hopes to buy Sun Microsystems for $6.5 billion dollars. The deal, if completed, will put to end one of the more enduring, and sometimes comical, rivalries in computing. Sun and IBM for years have competed against each other in servers, storage systems, consulting and other high-end computing markets. The comical part was how former Sun CEO Scott McNealy would try to characterize the rivalry as "humankind versus IBM Global Services." Somehow, that titanic battle occurred (on my behalf) without me even noticing. You too? But in any event, the deal will also have implications for the future of efficient data centers and the smart grid. Although it's relatively small compared to IBM, Sun has always done quite well in exploiting lab results commercially. In the past two years, Sun has showcased a number of technologies and design techniques it has employed to reduce data center power consumption. Last week, for instance, Sun showed off a flash-based hard drive for servers. IBM conducts a lot of the same research and has similar products, but sometimes these developments get lots in the heft and mass that is IBM. Sun, partly by virtue of its size and party by virtue of a strong talent for marketing complex technologies, can help IBM hone its message. In other words, the real value of this acquisition, beyond a large customer base, could be in Sun's ability to communicate. The combined companies will also now tower over HP and Dell in terms of sheer size when it comes to bidding on contracts for new data centers.