Sun addresses HP's nines

Sun Microsystems has launched a high-availability programme in an attempt to take on Hewlett Packard's 'five nines: five minutes' initiative, which was introduced more than a year ago.

As a result, Sun has come up with a set of products, services and partnerships, dubbed Sunup, in an effort to deliver high-availability capabilities to enterprises with essential applications.

Sunup will measure uptime levels at customer sites that will include education and consulting services to help users develop high-availability skills in-house.

The hardware supplier also plans to install software on users' systems to monitor availability and will use this data to calculate Sun employee compensation schemes. It has also integrated its Symon software, which manages Sun servers, with such systems management software as Computer Associates' Unicenter, IBM's Tivoli, BMC Software's products and Halcyon.

Andy Ingram, director of marketing at Sun's enterprise server products group, said: 'Availability is not just a matter of the number of nines. Some 80 per cent of downtime is due to process and people issues - only 20 per cent is due to products.'

He claimed that the Sunup programme addressed all these issues, and maintained that a Sun standalone server could already deliver the same level of availability as an HP cluster. He added that Sun can guarantee up to 99.95 of uptime on a single Sun Enterprise 10000 system and up to 99.975 on clustered Enterprise 10000 systems.

Hewlett Packard was unavailable to comment.