Sun Microsystems Inc turned out its first team last week trying to send Hewlett-Packard Co’s PA-8000 new commercial servers for an early bath. Vice-president Anil Gadre believes that Hewlett-Packard’s pre-Merced late in life kickers still fall far short of Sun’s reliability, availability and serviceability offerings. Gadre is hoping Sun will capitalize on what he believes are weaknesses in Hewlett-Packard and IBM Corp’s long-term road maps and processor strategies. He thinks customers are starting to understand that Hewlett-Packard will have the same kind of issues moving from HP-UX on PA-RISC to HP-UX on Merced as the pain Sun went through moving from Solaris 1 to Solaris 2 and up to UltraSparc. Gadre expects Sun to gain market share at IBM and Digital Equipment Corp’s expense this year – but interestingly not against Hewlett-Packard, which leads IBM and Sun in the commercial Unix server market. Of the 250MHz UltraSparc II makeover of the Ultra Enterprise server line, promised for this fall (CI No 2,901). Sun has indicated processor concerns are late-year early 1997 concerns. Gadre says most Ultra Enterprise 6000 Series customers are buying 10-way configurations and above.
