RE AC and Mark Mulvaney
RE: AC - "Maybe HP think 8 sockets will become even more important when Intel stop making plans for the next generation of Itanium...." <Yawn> Did someone rattle the nutcage again? You mention Nonstop as replacing Itanium servers, which shows your complete lack of knowledge, as Nonstop is an Itanium platform.... D'uh!
"....to Sun (tricky task, that "retain trust" thing already upset Alpha customers bigtime once...)...." Oh, and all those Sun flip-flops on their schizophrenic roadmaps make them look so reliable ("we hate Linux <flip> we love Linux just look at my penguin suit <flop> we don't have a Linux strategy period <flip> we love Red Hat <flop> give Red Hat the boot <flip> Solaris on SPARC <flop> Solaris on x86 <flip> Windows on x86 <flop> Solaris on T1/T2 <flip> don't buy APL, wait for Rock <flop> buy APL with FSC's SPARC64 whilst we struggle with Rock <flop, flop, flop>"). Check the IDC figures, HP has retained the Alpha customers, they have grown the Itanium bizz, and SPARC is shrinking and dying. Customers appreciate the steady and reliable strategy of HP, which is why they sold eight times as many servers in Q4 2007 as Sun. Double d'uh!
RE: Mark Mulvaney - HP didn't promise anything, if you check all vendors put lots of lovely disclaimers on their roadmaps, including King of the Flip-Flops Sun. If you are too stupid to read the small print then it's no surprise you're now running Slowaris. HP instead looked at the work AdvFS would entail compared to the benefits, then checked with market-leading file-system provider Veritas and decided Veritas had the better product with the better development potential, and it was already ready for hp-ux. And, of course, there's no nasty intellectual property disputes with Veritas/Symantec, unlike with Sun whom (IMHO) half-inched ZFS from NetApp.
"....Also they should have ported HP-UX to x86-64..." Unlike Sun, HP realised that porting their commercial UNIX would put them in conflict with the rising tide of Linux. HP is now the leading server vendor for Linux by a massive amount, making piles more money than the tiddly amount Sun makes with Slowaris x86. What HP did do was carefully port tools like ServiceGuard to Linux, to enhance the Linux experience, rather than being stubbornly stupid and trying too defeat Linux like Sun failed to do. The result is that HP is a respected figure in the Linux community and in the businessplace, whereas Sun is viewed by the Linux community as a smaller M$, and in the businessplace Sun is viewed with distrust given their inability to deliver such monumentally hyped flops as UltraSPARC V and their indecision on Linux and Windows. Please borrow a "d'uh" from AC seeing as you seem to like using other people's work.