Sun jibes HP over PwC and Superdome

Executives at Sun Microsystems have publicly criticised Hewlett Packard (HP) over its recently launched Superdome server and its plans to acquire a division of consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

HP is in talks with PwC about buying its global management and IT consulting business in a bid to become an IT services and consulting player.

Speaking at the launch of UltraSparc III, Ed Zander, president at Sun, said: "It's the pure product companies that will win. Maybe in the future, HP will OEM some of our products - it might be useful for its system integration capability."

In a dig at HP's recently announced Superdome server, John Shoemaker, executive vice president at Sun's system products group, said: "Partitioning technology is important in high-availability mainframe-like environments. The competition is only just beginning to introduce first generation products."

However, analysts have yet to be convinced about HP's Superdome servers. Jeff Hewitt, an analyst at Gartner, said: "HP virtual partitioning falls short of partitioning from Sun's E10000. Virtual partitioning is yet to be proven. Superdome appears weak in availability and manageability. I still need to see more proof about its failover scenarios. But there's an opening in the market for availability."

"There have been issues with Sun's CPU caching and Sun is not known for its great service," he added. "There is an opportunity for HP to exploit that."

Shoemaker said Sun had learned a lesson from its CPU caching problems, which have been traced back to one of its suppliers, and has redesigned the component. He added that technology designed to address the problem would be introduced in the next 30 days.