Sun Goes After HP-UX Base, Again and Again

Published: March 9, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After its public relations stunt a week ago, when Sun Microsystems chairman and CEO, Scott McNealy proposed that Hewlett-Packard merge its HP-UX variant of Unix with Sun's own Solaris platform, Sun is this week showing its true colors by once again trying to claim that HP is not investing in its HP-UX platform and that HP-UX customers would do better to move over to a Solaris platform.

If the merger of Solaris and HP-UX was a PR stunt, this marketing blitz aimed at HP-UX is a broken record. But because Solaris is now open source and runs on various X86 and X64 server platforms--including HP's own ProLiants, which cannot run HP-UX--this may sound like music to the ears of some IT managers.

Sun says that Solaris 10 on Opteron now supports over 1,000 mission-critical applications, thousands of open source applications, and over 550 different server platforms, as if this was somehow stronger than HP-UX on Itanium. The Itanium processor is getting some traction in the market, has 10 major platform providers pushing it and a commitment to invest $10 billion in development between 2006 and 2010. Oracle just said that it would get its E-Business 12i Suite running on HP-UX on Itanium by year's end, and SAP's mySAP suite already runs on it. The dual-core "Montecito" Itanium processors are set to double the performance of Itanium machines by the middle of the year, and HP will in a few weeks launch its third generation "Arches" chipset for Itanium servers, which will use these chips and offer substantial performance improvements. While no one would call Itanium the force it could have been--and maybe should have been--in the server market, this is not exactly the position of weakness that Itanium was in two years ago.

Because Unix ports are relatively easy, the big three Unix players--Sun, HP, and IBM--have nearly perpetual competitive replacement deals running. What's new this time around is that Sun has created a user forum where companies that make the jump from HP-UX to Solaris 10 can chat about their experiences. Sun is also chucking in an additional 20 percent discount for HP shops that buy a new Sun Fire server (either Sparc or Opteron versions) and a try-before-you-buy test drive on a T2000 server using the "Niagara" eight-core Sparc T1 processor. Customers who buy a Sun Fire server using UltraSparc-IV or UltraSparc-IV+ processors can get a license to the Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition database for free, provided they pay for maintenance (this deal applies to all Sun Fire customers, through a deal Sun negotiated with Oracle to make its Sparc servers more competitive).

While this is all well and good, if Sun really wanted to go after HP-UX customers aggressively, it would realize that the vast number of HP-UX shops run ERP software (unlike Sun shops, which are predominantly in telecom companies, financial services firms, service providers, or government agencies) and they want midrange Opteron machines and the very aggressive pricing they have. Sun needs to get its four-socket and right-socket servers into the market to really take a run at the HP midrange. And to counter that move, HP needs to have very aggressive performance and pricing on its Integrity servers using the Montecito processors--or move HP-UX to its ProLiants. The latter seems very unlikely.