Sun makes counter offer to HP's availability guarantee

War has been declared over a fraction of a percentage in the battle for high-availability Unix.

Sun Microsystems has taken on rival Hewlett-Packard's 'five nines: five minutes' programme with the launch of SunUP, a set of products and services that is targeted at organisations with mission-critical systems.

Andy Ingram, director of marketing at Sun's enterprise products group, dismissed HP's offer of 99.95 per cent guaranteed uptime for customers using HP-UX clusters. He claimed that a Sun standalone server could deliver the same level of availability as an HP cluster. He said a single Sun Enterprise 10000 system could match HP's 99.95 per cent guarantee, and added that a cluster of Enterprise 10000 boxes could provide 99.975 availability.

"Availability is not just a matter of the number of nines. Some 89 per cent of downtime is due to process and people issues, and only 20 per cent is due to products," said Ingram.

HP, however, warned customers to look carefully at Sun's claims. "It's easier to make claims, but harder to deliver. It depends how you look at the numbers. Sun says it can give up to 99.975, but 'up to' is not a commitment," said Alain Convert, HP's marketing manager for mission-critical systems in Europe. "We have many high-availability customers, and at least one with over 1,000 days' uptime. We could use these to say that we offer 100 per cent."

Sun pointed out that although 99 per cent availability appears to be an acceptable level, it translates to almost 90 hours of unscheduled outage per year - almost four days. Based on the rival company's figures, HP is promising annual downtime of 4.4 hours, while Sun cuts the figure to 2.2 hours.