HP tries harder to woo Sun customers
- Shankland covered the tech industry for more than 25 years and was a science writer for five years before that. He has deep expertise in microprocessors, digital photography, computer hardware and software, internet standards, web technology, and more.
Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday unveiled an expanded program to woo Sun server customers using either Sun's Sparc processors or x86 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.
Under one element of program, HP is expanding its certification of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system onto seven new Intel Xeon-based server models. HP argues that capturing Sun Solaris customers lets HP persuade them to buy Linux instead, but Sun argues that Solaris is the stickier relationship and that the operating system is leading to new customers.
The other element of the program is geared for those running Solaris on Sparc chips. Customers with that technology now can use HP's Itanium servers running Linux instead, bridging the gap by using translation software from start-up Transitive.
Intel, trying to get its Itanium processor to catch on more widely, touted the Transitive option at its Intel Developer Forum conference last September. Pat Gelsigner, co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, introduced a demonstration of the technology with the words, "Ladies and gentlemen, the highest-performance Sparc machine: the Itanium platform you see here today." (However, the test compared Itanium to a 1.5GHz Sparc chip that had been surpassed at the time by a newer 1.8GHz model.)