... please explain to us why these boxen are so much better than the ones from Sun - using reason rather than invective.

Whilst I am encouraged to see you still eager to spar, I sense that in your case it is with the blind optimism of the foolish. I am not being paid by The Register to analyse the new DL580 G5, I'll let Ashlee do that and then we can pass comment on whether we feel it is an impartial assessment. OK, I'll pass technical comment and you can just throw insults. But your request does seem to reinforce your need for everyone else to do your technical homework for you. As I suggested before, try a bit of reading. Even better, if you work for a major company (sorry, I admit I didn't manage to type that with a straight face), you could ask the vendors to supply some demo kit to compare. I have done so before, it's quite fun, and it really helps weasel a bit of extra discount out of the salesmen! ;)

Well let's see! Companies are profit motivated. (ANSWER YOUR QUESTION)

Intels probably up to their old tricks. I'll just bet hp had more profit room to work with than Sun

By the way brnt you may have some tech savvy but u sure don't have any business savvy

WoW. For a moment I thought I was reading an HP Press Release.

I recently set up a 8 core HP Proliant (8GB RAM) based on the 5150 Xeon and after installing 2003R2 and SQL2005 Workgroup edition we managed to get some of the client SQL running up to 2+ minutes down to the 10s of milliseconds. The kit only cost 3 Grand, although I had a sense the company would be willing to pay a hell of a lot more if they needed to get the efficiency and increased productivity. We've used HP for years and we've never had any issues in the hundreds of different servers that we watch over, no blown power supplies, no faulty memory, no damaged discs - nothing. And we’ve tried other brands such as Dell, Samsung and IBM but have had numerous faults with these machines.

I think HP and Microsoft make a great duo because under the correct management they just get the job done and definitely make my job easier.

So apart from the time HP sent out those weird Linuxy keyboards with no “Windows Key” and a dodgy 7.80 Smartstart CDs I would definitely recommend their kit.

Yes, it does sound like an HP press release. I get the idea Clay is a bit of a relay rather than a transmitter of original ideas, and definitely no chance of any Leprechaun poop with him.

The primary reason that I can see for the HP offering being competitive in a commodity market is the inclusion of the vast number of PCI-variant slots. That has always been the forte of the 500-class HP server, and it is good to see that they have inclued 11 PCI-Express slots in the new model as base, plus option to expand even that.

If you are building a clustered data warehouse for decision support, you will want those slots to ensure that you have enough HBA cards to interface with all of your SAN boxes with enough bandwidth for fast table-scans, as well as redundancy and fail-over. If you decide to upgrade from giga-ethernet to faster connects for your cluster communications, you will want those slots for the Infiband or other connections you use. Basically, you can never have enough fast slots when building a cluster, and HP provides that better than most other manufacturers.

Hi guys,

I'm not Matt but I'd like to give my 2 cents about the ongoing discussion Sun vs. Intel.

I think that simply some processors are better suited for some tasks than others, especially if the "other processors" are more geared to be more of a Swiss army knife. Don't get me wrong; the quadruple core Intel CPUs are great machines and I'm sure that the DL580 will really rock, but the better is always the enemy of the good.

In data mining access time is crucial, so applications try to keep as much of the index in RAM rather than on disk, so the amount of addressable memory is an interesting factor, wouldn't you agree? Thus, the Sun X4450 Server equally matched to the HP DL585 G5 with 128 G. Let's say since we're lacking benchmarks, the common chip set stands for same speed and Sun's twice the amount of DIMMs doesn't give it an edge. Thus, it's Rack Space and internal disks we're looking at next, where the former seems to give the HP with its 8 internal drives an edge, but who puts databases on internal disks? I don't and certainly you don't either. So it's left to Rack units and there the Sun is simply smaller, leaving room for the second box of the FiberChannel Storage System.

Apart from that, I would probably look into SPARC CPUs when considering a 16 Core one eighth Terabye RAM machine, these guys scale better (thet's what the S stands for, isn't it), and one's less limited by the RAM restrictions so much.

Get an 8 core Xeon Mac Pro. You can also grate cheese on it! And I like that you can hang it from the ceiling with a rope through the handles. No need for a rack.