Sun pitches Solaris to HP

Sun CEO Scott McNealy has sent a public letter to Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, encouraging him to shelve HP-UX for Itanium and adopt Solaris 10.

"We propose an alternative - that Sun and HP commit to converge HP-UX with Sun`s flagship volume Unix, Solaris 10," says the letter, which is accessible at the Sun Web site.

"Solaris 10 has momentum: over four million licences in just the past year, more licenses than HP has shipped with HP-UX in the history of the company. I would welcome the opportunity to meet and discuss how we can work together to satisfy customer demand - we stand ready to help," adds McNealy in his letter.

Microsoft`s release of Exchange 12 for 64-bit servers has met with some concern by customers because it could require them to purchase new hardware, reports IT World.

Microsoft released the beta 1 of the next version of its e-mail server software in December, but only 1 400 users had access to that release, says Megan Kidd, an Exchange senior product marketing manager for Microsoft.

"Microsoft expects to make Exchange Server 12 generally available in late 2006 or early 2007," adds the report.

Intel is positioning Itanium to rival Risc systems, but it has some hurdles to overcome, says VnuNet, in an introduction to a feature article looking at the Itanium servers.

"While some analysts are still focused on arguments about using Itanium servers for common business workloads, it seems Intel now accepts this is not the most likely market for servers built with the chip," contends the article.

Itanium is targeted at a different market to Intel`s Xeon server line, and competes against Risc chips, says Boyd Davis, GM of Intel`s server marketing group.