Hewlett-Packard Co, which says its five nines campaign launched in February 1998 (CI No 3,345) has spurred its rival Sun Microsystems Inc into making similar claims, denies that Sun has now taken the lead in high availability and RAS reliability, availability and serviceability ratings. It says that it obviously has Sun running scared and that Sun appears to be focused on cure, rather than prevention. HP officials told Computergram on Tuesday night to note that Sun is careful to claim uptime numbers up to 99.95% uptime on single Sun Enterprise 10000 systems, and up to 99.975% on clustered Sun Enterprise 10000 systems. Those up tos are rarely achieved, according to HP. Scheduled to reach its 99.999% uptime goal in 2000, HP currently offers 99.95% uptime rates on its clustered servers, while Sun is making similar claims for single systems. HP says that customers don’t believe that single systems are the way to go for high-availability. It says HP already includes the first networking layer up to Cisco Systems Inc switches, along with storage systems within its high-availability domain, and will shortly be including databases. And although HP doesn’t currently include planned downtime within its figures, it will do so in the future. It claims that underneath Sun’s higher uptime claims there lies a custom approach, and that its own figures are based on off the shelf standard systems. We have customers getting four nines today. HP services and disaster recovery – which Sun doesn’t offer, it says – are also part of the overall package, and HP is working on integrated services agreements with SAP, Oracle and Cisco. As for tying workers compensation plans into system uptime, HP says it has measured its teams on customer satisfaction for some time.
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