Oracle 11i on HP or SUN? (not trying to starting a war)

If this is the wrong group, I apologies but it seemed correctly placed. This also is not a call for someone else to do my do diligence. Ask my vendors, I've beaten the hell out of both of them. My problem is lack of experience actually running a SUN and most input I get is based more on loyalty rather than subjective review.

We're looking at replacing our outdated ERP/CRM systems with the 11i application suite including WMS, TeleSales, Marketing, Merchandising, etc. Our call center takes about 3-8,000 orders a day through 130 seats, and ship 80% same day so the transaction volume speed requirements are high. We're also a Marketing company so our OLAP requirements will also be high in order to data mine 3 years of data on an ongoing bases. We're projecting 15-20% year over year growth so I'm planning for 3 years stability. I hope this is enough without getting boring ;)

We've been an HP shop for 5 years and I can truly say that we're pretty happy with them. We've always run 24x7x4 support and have never been left out in the cold. This is partially due to the fact that I designed the systems with fault-tolerance built it at the hardware level so it would be hard to bring down the entire system in one shot. (knocking on wood)

Because Oracle is first developed on SUN and because 11i runs J2EE and SUN is the author of this, I felt is was important to review SUN as the platform going forward to maximize support opportunities in order to minimize problems that could effect us - call me paranoid but I'm planning for the worse. I know SUN has the VOS with Oracle and we would opt for gold server for the 24x7 so we would have the VOS access, which sounds comfortable but don't know if the reality of the SUN/Oracle relationship through VOS and through the J2EE really brings more to the table.

Questions:

Trying to focus on 11i, can you share your experience with Oracle and the stability of the application suit? I know in the past they've had trouble but current research shows they've greatly improved but are not problem free.

Anyone out there running 11i on SUN but use to be an HP shop? Why did you change and what has been the +/- in doing so? What level of support do you have and how has it been verse HP.

The same question but running 11i on HP but use to be a SUN shop.

It's my review that both make pretty strong hardware (not trying to start a war here!) but it seems HP's recommendations are better suited for scaling than SUN's proposal as outlined below and based on benchmark results from specit2000 figures.

Basic design is setup of separate devel, production, OLAP with failure via service-guard

Sun:

	4 e280 900mhz 4gig
	3 v880 6 750mhz 8gig
	2 T3 18x36gi

HP
	4 a500 750mhz 2gig
	3 rp7400 4 750mhz 8gig
	2 va7100 dual fiber 15x36gig

Thanks for reviewing and if you have constructive insight, I look forward to hearing from you. Received on Fri Mar 22 2002 - 22:59:43 CST