Hewlett-Packard Co’s V-Class server may lead the benchmarking stakes over Sun Microsystems Inc on some single-node performance metrics, but Sun says what users are looking for is application performance, where it still outperforms HP on SAP R/3 numbers for instance. Sun says 85% of its high-end Starfire server installations are in use at commercial accounts, the majority employed doing OLTP work with some data warehousing. 35% of users run both on one box. Integrated application performance is where the real action is however, Sun says. Customers are also demanding that vendors incur penalties for system downtime. Sun claims its Unix SMP servers currently offer 99.99% uptime, or 99.95% availability when systems have more than 32 processors. Sun claims to have a handful of 64-processor Starfire fat-free mainframe users and some two-node clusters installed. Its Full Moon clustering, management and high-availability development is currently at around a quarter of its intended scope.
