Sun offers a proven combination of hardware and software, which gives great peace of mind to at least one IT executive. "Our corporation isn't a science project," says Rich Liddell, VP of enterprise data and infrastructure at BellSouth Corp., a regional telephone company in Atlanta. Liddell oversees about 3,000 servers, including dozens of Sun's top-of-the-line Enterprise 10000 machines running database applications, middleware, and Web servers and says he doesn't want to experiment with new, unproven products to run the business. Tight integration between Sun's version of the Unix operating system, Solaris, and its UltraSparc processors provides the necessary reliability and predictability, he says.

That tight integration between hardware and operating system is a big selling point for Sun. Solaris 8, update 4, features the SunPlex cluster file system and improved configuration, provisioning, and change-management features, which let administrators move computing resources to where they're needed and manage them as a single pool of resources.

More companies are building IT infrastructures that can scale both horizontally and vertically, says Andy Ingram, VP of Solaris marketing at Sun. Such an architecture usually has many small, inexpensive, and easy-to-manage devices at the edge of a network and a high-performance, high-capacity system in data centers. "Solaris becomes a network computing environment and hides the complexity of multiple boxes," he says. "We must manage that inherent complexity for our customers. Our operating system has to step up."

Sun is also stepping up the underlying hardware. Later this year, it will introduce its next-generation Starcat server, which will hold between 72 and 105 processors. Starcat replaces the 64-processor E10000 server, also called Starfire. Starcat is expected initially to have three times the power of Starfire--and, within three years, five times the power. John Shoemaker, executive VP for Sun's systems business, says Starcat's internal redundancy will keep the system running even if components fail. "We can pull boards out and the system keeps running," he says. "And we're bringing those high-end features down to an entry-level price of $75,000."

But Sun faces tough competition. In October, IBM will unveil Regatta, its next-generation Unix server. Sources say the system will feature up to 32 processors, compared with 24 in its predecessor, the IBM pSeries 680 (formerly the S/80). The Power 4 processors inside will run at a clock speed of 1 GHz. IBM will also use copper and silicon-on-insulator bus interconnect technology, which, in concert with the faster processors, will move data through the system at around 100 Gbytes per second, compared with 23 Gbytes per second in the p680. IBM builds each Power 4 chip with two processors, and each processor has a link to input/output and memory to boost performance. New features in the Regatta system are designed to automatically adapt to peak workloads and better deal with spikes in traffic. It will eventually process 400,000 to 500,000 transactions per minute, Illuminata's Eunice predicts.

Compaq, another leading high-end server maker, plans its own enhancements. This month, a new version of its Tru64 Unix, code-named Yankee, will be available with Oracle9i support and an integrated cluster file system. But Compaq will keep its focus on what it considers elite vertical markets. "Compaq Tru64 Unix goes after the high-functionality Unix market--telecom, financial services, the most demanding E-businesses, and technical computing with gobs of data," says Rick Frazier, VP of marketing and business development for business-critical computing.

That kind of power helped Christina Pascarella, VP at Houston hosting company Hostcentric Inc., build the redundancy she needed--and discover when her Dutch and Italian ancestors stepped off a boat at Ellis Island. Pascarella says good clustering technology is critical as businesses add servers to meet the growing Internet demand. That's one reason Hostcentric hosts much of its customer data on Compaq's 64-bit AlphaServer machines running Tru64 Unix. Using Compaq's TruCluster software, Hostcentric staffers can manage large clusters of AlphaServers as if each cluster were a single device. The latest version of the software, 5.1, automatically detects servers as they're added to the cluster. "It's ahead of the pack, which is really important for the level of redundancy we need," Pascarella says.

Hostcentric hosts a 22-million name database for the American Family Immigration History Center at Ellis Island. Pieced together from the passenger manifests of America-bound ocean liners, the database went live in April with the names of immigrants who disembarked at the port between 1892 and 1924. Those travelers' descendants can now search for their ancestors names on the Web (at ellis islandrecords.org) and at kiosks on Ellis Island. The site has proved enormously popular, attracting millions of users a day. Pascarella tracked her forebears' movements from the Netherlands and Italy to the United States. "This is a project that really touched me and made it personal," she says.

For its part, Hewlett-Packard is throwing its high-end efforts behind Superdome, which features up to 64 CPUs, 192 I/O slots for Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, and asynchronous transfer mode connectivity, and 256 Gbytes of memory for large databases. Each processor can be set up as a virtual server and run a separate application, and managers can move resources around to better handle heavy workloads.

Customers are demanding systems that let them reallocate power as necessary and reduce the number of individual servers needed to run a business, says Superdome marketing manager Tom Anderson. The cost of managing server farms can run seven to eight times the up-front cost of the computers, which makes for a compelling case to consolidate servers by moving to Superdome, he says.

The applications couldn't get more serious than those run by Lynn Parnell, director of the Department of Defense's distributed center for high-performance computing at the U.S. Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego, where the Navy develops weapons systems. The center uses an HP 9000 Superdome server for signal and image processing and to run the database apps that drive many of the Navy's command-and-control operations, which track the location of ships at sea and give them directions.

The Navy chose Superdome because it needed a system able to run three or four jobs simultaneously and translate files from Unix to Windows 2000, on which the Navy plans to standardize all its operations. While there's no timetable for the shift to Windows, Parnell says the Navy wants to end up with a single, inexpensive platform for all its computing needs to reduce overall costs. But, he says, that won't happen until Windows can do everything that HP-UX, HP's version of Unix, can do.