HP has hired Stephen DeWitt to run its PC business in the Americas, an interesting choice considering he’s not a PC guy.

DeWitt’s the fellow Sun lost over $2 billion on when it bought him, his Cobalt Networks operation and its Linux server appliances.

After leaving Sun, where he was, for a while, head of the Content Delivery and Edge Computing unit Sun created for Cobalt before it was closed down, he started Azul Systems building giant Java server appliances out of 768 Azul-created multi-core chips and 768GB of memory and caught hell from Sun for poaching its ideas about multithreading and multi-core processors.

Sun is now believed to own a piece of Azul by way of settlement.

DeWitt, who was at Cisco and Symantec before his Cobalt adventure, was replaced as Azul’s CEO by the company’s number two Scott Sellers at the end of November, with DeWitt as chairman.

Indicative of the activity over there, Azul, which picked up another $40 million in financing in September, hasn’t put out a press release since then.

At HP DeWitt replaces Mike Larson, who’s retiring.