In an unusual strategy of openly belittling a competitor's technology, Sun Microsystems has enlisted the aid of a new client, using a small contract win in Canberra as a platform to issue an extraordinary attack on the hardware products of Hewlett-Packard and Intel.

Canberra-based utility ActewAGL has selected Sun Microsystems architecture as its platform of choice for its core applications. While the hardware contract  is relatively small  at about $200,000, Sun described the deal as: "another significant win for Sun’s HP-Away Migration Program, launched in 2003 and designed to help companies port their applications from HP’s AlphaServer/Tru64 platform to a Sun SPARC/Solaris platform."

Sun claims that the move from HP will provide ActewAGL with an average 50% improvement in performance, lower maintenance costs and ease of infrastructure management. The company also estimates the move to Sun will save an additional $30,000 in annual maintenance costs.

ActewAGL provides electricity, natural gas, water and wastewater services to about 300,000 residential, business and government customers in the ACT.

In announcing the deal with Sun, senior ICT management at ACTewAGL were particularly harsh in their judgement of HP's existing technology and were equally critical of the new HP-Intel Itanium platform.

“We no longer had any faith in HP’s Tru64 technology and required alternative systems to provide 64-bit computing capability,” said Carsten Larsen, chief information officer for ActewAGL. “Upon looking at what the market had to offer, we chose Sun’s SPARC servers and Solaris operating system because it provided a simple yet robust, cost-effective solution.”

“We had reached the end of the line with our HP AlphaServer platform,” added Debesh Halder, manager, Unix Systems, ActewAGL. “The technology was four years old and struggling to cope with increased demand. However, we were not keen to move to the HP-Intel developed Itanium architecture, which is a relatively new technology. We were looking for a stable, proven platform and Sun was it.”

ActewAGL has installed six Sun Fire(tm) V440 servers, two Sun(tm) Rack 900 rack cabinets and two K Virtual Machines (KVM) switches and migrated its core applications to a Sun Solaris operating system. The project took about 12 months to complete, which included research, selection, procurement, custom development, testing and implementation.
 
Since going live with the Sun platform, ActewAGL claims system performance improvements of up to 70%. “A report that used to take 10 minutes to generate can now be completed in five minutes,” said Halder. “Staff can also login to financial applications via the Web, which is faster and more convenient for them. Productivity has improved and they are also much happier.”

Sun, which is under increasing pressure to maintain the market share of its proprietary SPARC/Solaris platform in the face of stiff opposition from Intel-based hardware and the Linux open source operating system, has responded by becoming increasingly aggressive in its rhetoric.

“The ActewAGL win is only the beginning,” said Duncan Bennet, sales director, Sun Microsystems Australia and New Zealand. “There are many companies like ActewAGL that are reluctant to migrate their critical applications to the pricier, untested Itanium architecture. Sun offers a no-risk, rock-solid, affordable platform with a proven track record. We believe customers will find SPARC and Solaris a safer, more compelling option than competitive solutions.”