Sun Microsystems and its partners today offer programs for HP customers facing a complicated and expensive migration from PA-RISC HP-UX to Intel's proprietary Itanium platform. Sun has created a community resource for these customers, in addition to offering a low-cost path of support and services to help them move to the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) and industry standard x64 server platforms. Also today, Sun announced its intention to work with HP to provide support for the Solaris 10 OS across its entire server product line. As HP migrates away from PA-RISC technology and limits resources dedicated to HP-UX to only the Itanium platform, customers now have the chance to migrate to an alternative mission-critical 64-bit UNIX platform based on an open source operating system and industry standard x64 systems - Solaris 10 on AMD Opteron processor-based systems. With more than 1000 enterprise class applications and thousands of additional open source applications, the combination of the Solaris 10 OS and x64 systems has broad ISV and developer support. The Solaris 10 OS is also a vendor-neutral UNIX operating system with support for the broadest range of x64/x86 platforms from major systems vendors, including HP's ProLiant line of servers, making Solaris 10 an ideal upgrade for HP-UX customers. In addition, Sun and its partners are able to offer extensive migration and porting support to ease the transition and help customers get the benefits of this open platform. "The migration to Solaris 10, the most advanced operating system on the planet, is no more complicated than that of the transition HP customers are facing," said Tom Goguen, vice president of System Software at Sun Microsystems. "Solaris 10 has great momentum in the marketplace, including four million registered licenses, a growing community, and broad support for existing applications and systems that can help these customers get the most out of their existing investment." Sun offers a full-range of systems, including industry standard AMD Opteron processor-based servers running on the x64/86 platform and UltraSPARC processor-based Sun Fire servers that have set a new industry standard for performance, space and energy efficiency. Regardless of platform choice, Sun supports the Solaris 10 OS running on more than 550 platforms, providing customers with the ability to take advantage of the Solaris 10 OS with the broadest choices of hardware. In addition, the Solaris 10 OS offers innovative features, such as Predictive Self-Healing, Dynamic Tracing (DTrace), Solaris ZFS, Solaris Containers and Solaris Containers for Linux Applications -- all features that are supported on HP Xeon and AMD Opteron-based systems. Sun and its best-in-class migration partners have a proven track record of helping customers migrate from HP to Sun. These programs from Sun Services and partners combine methodology, tools and services to scope and plan a project, architect the new environment and design the transition process, and implement the project. Sun's software and hardware services offerings include: * A community forum for customers to discuss and collaborate about their migrating from HP-UX to Sun and Solaris. * Consulting and roadmap services that will help customers understand the roadmap for the future of the Solaris 10 OS and help customers identify potential business value and financial benefit from a move to the Solaris 10 OS; and * Migration assistance services that will help companies develop an application migration roadmap and priority schedule. Both of these previously announced services give customers the ability to understand the total cost associated with operations to create operational efficiency, cost savings and reduce complexity. * Through Sun Management Services, a comprehensive portfolio of flexible service management capabilities from Sun, Sun can work closely with HP customers to assess their operations and provide tailored services to meet their business needs. * Try It Before You Buy It: Given the high level of interest in these new breakthrough systems, Sun has been offering the industry's largest "Try and Buy" program that enables customers and ISV partners to test out a new Sun Fire T2000 server running the highly threaded UltraSPARC T1 processor free of charge for 60 days, with the option to purchase the system. * Discounts on all Sun Fire servers, UltraSPARC and x64-bit, on a trade-in of HP-UX system creates an opportunity for lower cost of entry to acquire Sun platforms. Customers will receive up to an additional 20% discount, up to over $100,000 in savings, toward the purchase of Sun Fire servers. * For customers looking at a hardware and software migration offering, Sun offers a discount on Java Web Infrastructure Suite with one year of support when customers purchase the Sun's new Sun Fire T2000 UltraSPARC T1-based server with CoolThreads technology or an AMD Opteron-based server. * With the purchase or upgrade of a Sun Fire UltraSPARC IV or IV+ processor-based server, customers can get Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses free of charge when signing up for the first year of database maintenance through Sun. For more information about these and other offerings from Sun, please visit: its Web site.