HP Lands More than 200 Sun
Server Customers in Sun Eclipse Program - A Mere Fleabite of an Irritant to Sun
PALO ALTO,
Calif. - September 21, 2004 -
HP today announced that in the past 18 months more than 200 customers
worldwide have chosen HP servers over Sun systems to help improve
agility in the datacenter and adapt rapidly to changing business needs.
By offering a portfolio of services and incentives with the broadest
industry standard-based server line, HP has gained new customers in financial
services, manufacturing, retail, aerospace, bioinformatics, telecommunications
and the public sector. In financial services alone, HP has won more than 40
significant deals from Sun Microsystems, Inc.
The 200 HP customer wins include Bank of Bolivariano of Ecuador,
Belkin Corp., Dynamic Net, Forbes.com and The University of Hong Kong.
"Numerous Sun customers looking for more choice, lower total cost
of ownership, better investment protection and a consistent long-term roadmap
have chosen HP for industry-standard enterprise solutions," said Mark
Hudson, vice president of marketing, Enterprise Storage and Servers, HP. "HP
is winning business from Sun by addressing critical customer needs, offering a
choice of operating systems and delivering the right technology at the right
price. In just the past three months, we've increased the number of migrations
to HP from Sun by 50%, moving customers to HP Integrity and ProLiant servers."
According to a 2004 META Group study, the top business drivers
prompting application replacement on Sun servers are the need for improved
agility and adaptability, which align closely with HP's Adaptive Enterprise
strategy.
The Sun Eclipse
Program, a comprehensive portfolio of services and incentives from HP, helps
Sun customers move to Adaptive Enterprise solutions. In the Americas, HP has
augmented the migration services it offers Sun customers with special incentives
and system trade-ins across its industry-standard servers, with the choice of
HP-UX, Linux or Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Other specific HP assurances to Sun customers in the Americas include
proof-of-concept and migration assistance for qualified customers, as well as
attractive incentives for education, mission-critical services, financing and
hardware trade-ins. HP also introduced a special introductory offer to qualified
Sun customers who are interested in HP's industry-leading blade solutions and is
offering incentives in proof-of-concept services to transition to the HP
BladeSystem infrastructure.
...HP profile
Editor's
comments:- I can cast some more light on the Sun Eclipse issue and its real
significance in the market. In October 2003 - I set up a resource page
Solaris
Migration - migrating away from Sun's OS - on the
SPARC Product Directory.
During the last 12 months, this has received only 1,522 pageviews out of 254,532
unique visitors - which is indicates a very low interest in this subject of 0.6%
of SPARC readers. So I don't think this is more than a fleabite of an irritant
to Sun's own marketers.
Sun's New SPARC Servers Set New Standards for Price Performance
SANTA
CLARA, Calif. - September 21, 2004 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. introduced
two new Solaris powered UltraSPARC IV servers-the Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire
V890.
The Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890 are available today at
starting prices of $30,995 (U.S. list) and $39,995 (U.S. list) respectively. The
Sun Fire V490 and Sun Fire V890 servers deliver up to twice the application
throughput of Sun's previous midrange server systems. The Sun Fire V490 and Sun
Fire V890 servers have set world-record benchmarks for sub-$50K platforms,
outperforming equivalent systems from HP and IBM in the 4- and 8-way space: The
Sun Fire V490 server achieved world record price/performance on the 1TB TPC-H
benchmark, demonstrating the highest performance data warehousing and database
architecture at this price point.
On the Lotus Domino R6iNotes benchmark, which simulates email users
accessing their mailboxes through the web, the Sun Fire V890 server set a triple
world-record in the 8 processor class of systems for best performance, highest
number of users per CPU, and best price/performance, demonstrating outstanding
processing power for a sub-$50K platform. The Sun Fire V890 server also
confirms Sun's leadership in the High Performance Computing marketplace by
producing the best SPECompM2001 performance result for all 8-way servers. It
eclipses the recent results posted by a similarly equipped HP AlphaServer ES80
system by up to 17%. ...Sun profile
ACSL Announces SPARC Buyer Preferences
Survey
Editor:-
September 16, 2004 - ACSL, publisher of the SPARC Product Directory,
announced today that it will run a SPARC Buyer Preferences survey in the 4th
quarter to determine the main reasons that users cite for buying SPARC systems.
The
survey will focus on organisations which have recently bought SPARC systems or
are planning to buy them within a 3 month window. The aim of the survey is to
learn what users themselves perceive to be the current strengths and weaknesses
of the SPARC platform. The results will be published in the SPARC Product
Directory in the new year.
In the period 1992 to 2000 it was easy to
understand why discerning users had a preference for SPARC systems. But in the
last 4 years many of the superficial relative strengths of the SPARC platform
such as:- performance, reliability and openness have been eroded or blurred.
Nevertheless it is undeniable that after years of decline - the SPARC
market is now seeing a resurgence in server shipments and revenue. The server
market and the technology choices facing users is much more complex today than
it has ever been before. The SPARC survey will seek to learn from users what
they see as the new factors which vendors should take into account to make sure
they are meeting users' needs. ...ACSL profile,
Market research,
SPARC Product Directory
Interphase Showcases Network Processor Module
PLANO,
Texas - September 15, 2004 - Interphase Corporation demonstrated its
recently-introduced iNAV 4550 PMC Communications Resource Module this week at
the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston, MA.
The versatile iNAV 4550 can be used as an advanced communications
controller for processing line interface traffic, a compact protocol conversion
module for interworking cell-based and packet-based protocols, or a powerful CPU
co-processor module for off-loading specialized processing functions such as
bridging and routing.
In addition to network convergence, the iNAV
4550's processing capabilities can be used to efficiently execute other system
functions such as IP over Ethernet (IPoE) and IP over ATM (IPoA) packet routing
& classification per RFC 2684, ATM cell switching, Ethernet switching, and
ATM SARing.
Designed with performance and flexibility in mind, the iNAV 4550
establishes a new benchmark in protocol interworking combining all the benefits
of a much more expensive solution with the easy integration of a NIC.
Availability of the iNAV 4550 is planned for Q1 2005.
...Interphase
profile, Events
Speculation About New Sun Servers
Editor:-
September 13, 2004 - Sun's rumored launch, later this month of new 4
and 8 way SPARC IV servers is discussed in an article on ComputerWorld.
The article says the new products have already been shipping to some
customers. ...Sun
profile, rackmount
SPARC systems
Perle Systems Unveils Software-Configurable Multi-Interface
Multi-Port Serial PCI Cards
NASHVILLE, TN
- September 9, 2004 - Perle Systems today released new 1, 2, 4, 8 and
16 port versions of its innovative new UltraPort SI universal 3.3v/5v PCI Serial
Cards.
With the UltraPort SI, Perle is the first vendor to
incorporate EIA-232, EIA-422 and EIA-485 interfaces on a single PCI serial card
and provide the ability to individually configure each interface type using
software commands. The UltraPort SI takes into account that today's low profile
PCs and servers have limited PCI slots and organizations may have requirements
for different serial ports to accommodate a variety of serial devices. By
combining RS232, RS422 and RS485 ports on one card, the UltraPort SI requires
only a single PCI slot. It also minimizes the need to install multiple drivers
and takes less time to configure.
Designed to meet the highly electromagnetic and electrostatic
environments found on factory floors and in carpeted environments in many retail
stores and office locations, the UltraPort SI features industry leading
protection from electrostatic discharges of up to 25K volts, providing safe and
reliable server operation. The UltraPort SI delivers maximum performance to a
serial environment by supporting communication speeds of 921.6 Kbps on EIA-232
and up to 3.6 Mbps on EIA-422/485 connections. It is available in standard and
low profile PCI card form factors and will work with all current Unix, Linux and
Windows operating systems.
...Perle
Systems profile | |
HP's Sun Eclipse
Program - A Mere Fleabite
Sun Sets New Standards for Price Performance
ACSL
Announces SPARC Buyer Survey
Interphase Showcases Network Processor
Module
Speculation About New Sun Servers
Perle Unveils
Software-Configurable Serial Cards
earlier news -
archive |
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6 Years of STORAGEsearch.com - looking back, looking
ahead
Our sister site - STORAGEsearch.com celebrates its
6th anniversary this month.
In an age when most IT web sites are
blurring into sameness, STORAGEsearch has maintained a unique brand identity
with its cartoon characters Megabyte the Mouse and family. But reliable
information and critical market analysis have also been important factors in
growing the readership every year since 1998.
Commenting about this
anniversary - Farid Neema, President of market analyst company
Peripheral Concepts, Inc.
- said "STORAGEsearch.com was one of the first online storage portals. I
appreciate its breadth of scope and reliability. It has always been an
authoritative source for anyone doing serious market research into this market."
What's been the most important trend in storage during the last 6
years?
Network storage which started with
Fibre-channel based
SANs in 1994, has changed
from being a small part of the overall enterprise storage market to being the
dominant part measured by revenue. In the late 1990s competing technologies like
NAS based on Ethernet, and
more recently, the emergence of
iSCSI have
simplified the management of storage area networks and extended their reach to
nearly every size of organisation.
The technical and economic
decoupling of storage from servers has created a major shift in the computer
market in which data repositories have become operating system agnostic and the
concept of corporate information life cycles have become more important than
processor chip generations.
What are going to be the most
important trends in storage during the next 6 years?
We're already
seeing that processor chipmakers have been struggling to achieve the same rate
of increase in 64 bit processors that they did with earlier 32 bit generations.
Sun's SPARC,
HP's Alpha,
IBM's PowerPC,
Intel's Itanium and even
AMD's Opteron will hit
performance ceilings which cannot be resolved by old tricks like increasing the
Gigahertz clock rate or adding more processors.
Many users have
already discovered that another way to speed up their applications is to use
solid state disks (SSDs) to
accelerate I/O bound critical data. Another benefit of SSDs is their potential
to reduce software licensing costs and server management complexity by reducing
the total amount of servers while maintaining or sometimes reducing response
times. This important architectural change will, when more widely adopted, mean
that the solid state disk market in 3 years time could grow to be bigger than
the NAS market is today, because it has the potential to provide the same
functionality as additional servers - but at lower cost and better reliability.
Eventually solid state disks will be factory fitted as standard instead of
being a user or systems integrator add-on as they are today.
We're also
going to see the consumerization of network storage which will eventually result
in the home entertainment and leisure market becoming a bigger user of disks
and RAID systems than the
IT market. In the next 10 years
hard disk drives will
have a capacity of 78 terabytes. You'll be able to fit a 500TB RAID system
inside the same space as a little match box.
What's going to
happen in the meantime?
Which old technologies will be discarded
and which new ones will become the hot products of tomorrow? We have many
articles which
speculate on this - but the only sure way to find out is to keep visiting the
news pages of
STORAGEsearch.com to see how this exciting future unfolds. ...ACSL (publisher)
profile, STORAGEsearch.com,
Storage portals | |
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Epoka Group
with sales offices in Denmark,
Germany and Russia is a leading European
supplier of Sun and Fujitsu SPARC solutions. | |
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