If your organization uses Sun Microsystems servers, you’ve had plenty of uncertainty recently. After years of steadily declining market share (with losses of more than a billion dollars in a single quarter in 2008),¹ Sun went looking for a buyer. After a failed IBM deal, the company has now agreed to be acquired by software giant Oracle Corp, if the deal passes government scrutiny.²

Faced with this uncertainty, it's no surprise that many Sun owners are looking for stability, value and a long-term strategy for their server investments. Many are looking to HP, says Bob Gill, managing director of server practice for TheInfoPro.

©2009 TheInfoPro, Inc. Investor Presentation Q1 2009 Servers Wave 7

The New York research firm surveys Fortune 1000 companies semiannually about their server-buying plans. TIP found in winter 2008 that 29 percent said they were considering moving from Sun to an alternative. “The standard narrative is, ‘We have concerns over Sun’s long-term viability. We don’t understand what its strategy is.”³ And when he asks them what company they’re considering instead? “Most people are going to say HP," he says. “The perception is that HP has the highest-quality servers,” with higher-quality components and good engineering, and a mature management system as well, he says. “HP has made huge inroads over Sun and IBM,” he adds.

Trinity Mirror plc, the UK’s largest newspaper publishing company, recently replaced its aging Sun Microsystems servers with modern HP server blades because the original Sun servers couldn’t handle the load.⁴ When the company did, staff immediately noticed an increase in performance.

Trinity Mirror also found that HP server blades are easier to manage, have a lower TCO due to lower power and cooling costs and are both more affordable and offer increased efficiency.

IT shops have also found that they can switch to HP servers and continue to run their Solaris operating system and other applications on top of it. BT Vision, which streams video on demand to BT Broadband subscribers, says it saved more than 80 percent on equipment costs and 60 percent on maintenance costs, by switching from Sun Fire V210 servers to HP BladeSystem servers while continuing to run the Solaris operating system.⁵

BT Vision users say they experienced marked improvements in performance and availability with BladeSystem. The new servers were five to eight times faster out-of-the-box and up to ten times faster after tuning. BT Vision also reported a 25 to 30 percent improvement in availability. In addition, there was more than a 50 percent reduction in time to deploy the 300 HP servers, while tripling user capacity – and user capacity can be tripled again without having to expand the data center. Three people who used to manage the Sun servers can now be deployed to other tasks.

Similarly, Jet Airways, an Indian airline focusing on the business traveler, says it found that by using HP servers it could save 80 percent over a special-purpose Sun server and 10 to 20 percent over Sun commodity servers.⁶ Likewise, the company didn't have to change its software or operating system.

HP offers choice, certainty and mission critical reliability with the breadth of our portfolio and partnerships. HP is your partner for a flexible and reliable IT environment, and we are helping Sun customers make the move easier with attractive incentives.

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