ACADEMIA

Sun Microsystems today announced details of yet another recent win in the financial services industry for its successful HP Away migration program. Data Action, a leading retail banking services company in Australia, recently replaced its HP server and storage environment with a comprehensive Sun infrastructure as it sought superior performing technologies backed by a solid long-term roadmap. HP customers continue to turn to Sun as a viable lifeline based on its impressive lineup of 64-bit enterprise computing systems and the Solaris 10 operating system (OS). "I'm a firm believer in good business partnerships - and HP had previously enjoyed two contract renewals with us but, coming up for the third time, the bar was clearly too high for them," said Brian McCulloch, chief executive officer, Data Action. "We set standard parameters for our existing provider to meet. HP was asked to demonstrate a life cycle for its hardware and a true growth path, not just blue sky technology. They recommended we switch to their new Itanium technology, which did not satisfy our needs. It lacked a proven direction or growth path, and, at the time of benchmarking, also required a move to an as yet unproven release of Sybase." Data Action then invited competitive responses from IBM and Sun. Sun proposed its Sun Fire V890 servers featuring the UltraSPARC IV processor. Coupled with the Solaris OS, the Sun Fire V890 server offers extensive compute, input/output and storage capacity. To test the performance gains from each of the servers, Data Action established a consistent, reproducible and measurable benchmark performance test. This entailed running a Batch Overnight process -- which essentially performs all interest accruals, transactional updates and statement preparation- for one of its large customers- on each of the platforms, then comparing the results. The Sun solution provided stellar performance and also supported the required version of Sybase at an appropriate price. "Data Action's move to Sun underscores what we've known for a long time -- customers are wary of HP's enterprise road-map, and they find in Sun a very healthy alternative," said Fred Kohout, vice president, marketing, Scalable Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. "HP customers must be scratching their collective heads, wondering if HP really has a credible UNIX operating system or high-end processor to choose from. And now Sun is gunning for HP's strong-hold on industry standard systems. With our new x64 servers, as well as UltraSPARC IV+ systems and Solaris 10 OS, Sun gives enterprise customers the most compelling product line-up in years with the freedom to choose industry standard SPARC or AMD Opteron processor-based systems." Following the recent launch of a new family of enterprise-class Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) multi-core available servers powered with the AMD Opteron processor, the Sun Fire X4100 server provides up to 1.5 times the performance, up to 56% power savings, and at one-half the price of current HP ProLiant Xeon servers(1). For an increased incentive for HP customers looking to get off 'Itanic', Sun will give any existing HP customer up to a 20% trade up allowance on any eligible HP Server. Customers interested in learning more can visit: its Web site.