HP sets out to save Sun customers
Added 3rd Aug 2009Called Sun Complete Care, the programme offers customers a wide variety of specialised services, support plans and financial incentives. According to HP executives, these include business case development, TCO/ROI analysis and migration assessment services, as well as design, migration and support to financing options. Also thrown in are trade-in opportunities on hardware, software and education programmes.
HP representatives have informed us that more than 100 enterprises chose to migrate from Sun to HP server and storage platforms in the last six months, in order to gain greater ROI. A press release issued by HP cited the following findings of various studies they had done as compelling reasons for the move these organisations had made: "On average, Sun customers are paying up to 80 per cent more in total cost of ownership (TCO) for Sun SPARC servers than customers using HP Integrity servers. Many applications are also significantly more expensive to run on SPARC servers compared with HP servers. It costs 50 per cent more per core to run Oracle's database software on SPARC than on HP Integrity."
One such showcase customer wheeled out to illustrate HP's point was premium Indian airline Jet Airways, which recently migrated from Sun to the HP ProLiant platform. "There was no reason to vertically scale with a high-cost Sun box. We were getting excellent price performance results with HP 4-way servers, so Sun dropped out of the picture," said general manager of Communications at Jet Airways, Satish Joshi. "We decided on building a 24-processor server base using 64-way HP ProLiant DL585 servers, which would save us 80 per cent of the cost of a Sun special-purpose machine and which beat Sun commodity servers handily."
There is more to the exodus from Sun to the safety of a more reliable technology provider than the impulse to achieve cost optimization for the present. In fact, the enterprises that have made the move were just as, if not more, concerned with the future of their infrastructure. "As I meet with Sun customers and partners, they are adamant that they need a more stable technology provider with proven solutions, long-term roadmaps and a solid future. By switching to HP, Sun customers will gain peace of mind, along with significant technology and return-on-investment advantages," said Neal Clapper, vice president and general manager, Enterprise Storage and Servers, Technology Solutions Group, HP Asia Pacific and Japan.
