"....An Itanium score of 2.8x faster than a SPARC score... at what cost?...." Well, just for you Sunshiners, I did try using the Sun online shop to price up an equivalent T5140 spec, only the online tool doesn't let you put more than 32GB of over-priced RAM into the SPARC box, and I ran out of PCIe slots and couldn't put in an internal RAID card for the boot disks way before I got to matching the number of fibre and Ethernet ports out of the BL870c. And then, there's the cost of the additional switches and mangement tools that you'd have to throw in to match the hp blades (I tried doing the same with the Sun baldes but you just can't get to an equivalent spec).

"....There is NOTHING to be proud of here, Matt...." No, nothing like having the fastest benchmark for a software solution you Sunshiners keep telling us is a key technology. Oh, hold on a sec - didn't Sun used to push these benchmarks like crazy? Could it be that since they have fallen off the performance map they just can't be bothered in even trying to benchmark their solutions? Did Ponytail lay off the testing team early?

"....Do the HP Itanium systems cost 10x as many Euros than the SUN SPARC systems? or is it 100x the Euros for that little 2.8x speed bump?...." Strange that hp seem so capable of supplying better systems at less cost to the customers then. Did you use the same warped calculator you use for all those Sun performance claims to calculate the costings there? Lots of research presented very neatly - not! Care to post some pricings to back up your wild claims (whilst your Sun rep can still give you prices)? I'm betting not.

"....The poor HP Itanium database server needed 7 dual-ported 1GigE Ethernet cards while the SUN just needed it's 10GigE Ethernet card. A little deficient in the I/O bus speed? Can't dig a 10GigE from a closet? Need a SUN Ethernet card?...." Lol, if you knew anything about other vendor's kit you'd know the Virtual Connect modules in the C-class blade chassis come with 10GbE ports. Looks like you know as little about the competition as you do about what customers actually want.

".....WE'RE WINNING!...." A quote that says it all about the deluded Sunshier mentality. How can losing money for years, losing marketshare for years, being late to every market with every product, being rejected for buyout by the two leading hardware vendors, going from a $200bn company to less than $6bn in real cash, refusing to let customers benchmark your kit because you know customers will then see how poorly it performs in real world tests, and finally being swallowed up at peanut value by a software company, class as winning? Sun is dead. SPARC is dead. Go find another cult.

RE: Matt Bryant: still looking for mr. goodbenchmark

Novatose, why do you bother posting as AC and then immediately after as David Halko? Your syntax, writing "style" and repeated innaccuracies and FUD are so obvious. Have they fired the rest of the marketeering droids already?

"....10519 12 HP-UX Integrity BL860c.... 09501 04 Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140...." And still pointing to a rack server rather than the new Sun CMT blade, and then comparing it to a different hp blade. Admit it, it's because you couldn't find any Sun benchmarks for the CMT blades, Sun have avoided them as they know the awful chassis design only compounds the poor CMT blade performance.

"....An equivalent SPARC T2+ blade would be the T6340 blade module....." Nope, not equivalent, they are different products. I would agree that both can't offer the performance or flexibility of options as the BL870c, but as to how the T6340 and T5140 compare you can't state as you don't know. Sun are very keen to keep any such comparison under wraps as they know how poorly their whole third failed attempts at blades do in comparison with hp blades.

"....Using the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark you suggested, to compare Itanium to SPARC Niagra, we can extrapolate the scaling factors on a dual-socket node...." Hilarious! You really don't have any idea how clusters work, do you? First off, you need reliable clustering and scaleable software and hardware - Sun can't post results for large T2/T2+ clusters becasue they know they scale clusters poorly. Secondly, you have the additional traffic in clusters that degrades performance as you add nodes - adding a fifth node does not guarantee a 25% increase in performance over four nodes, and it gets worse as you grow the cluster. So any extraploation is just the usual Sunshiner fantasy groping in the dark as Sun won't post large cluster results. Until they do, you can extrapolate all you like and no-one will believe you.

/maybe swine flu struck early, we just didn't notice the symptoms included delusional belief in Ponytail?