Corporate Express Inc. is preparing to replace two of its Sun Enterprise 10K servers with the Sun Fire 15K, and you'll have to forgive Andrig Miller if he has a tough time saying goodbye.

The high-end servers, made by Sun Microsystems, have served him well--and saved him a lot of money. Miller, VP of technical architecture for the Broomfield, Colo., office-supply company, hopes to capitalize on improvements to performance and scalability by making the upgrade. Corporate Express is making the change first to the latest version of Sun's Solaris platform--it's conducting integration testing this week of Solaris 8, which it will implement next month--and will follow that with one new F15K server in June.

The Sun Fire 15K, like its main competitors in high-end Unix servers, the Hewlett-Packard Superdome and the IBM Regatta, can be partitioned to handle multiple workloads or applications, says Jean Bozman, International Data Corp. research director. But there is a difference: "Sun would say it has more processors and an automated dynamic reconfiguration," a way to resize partitions quickly, she says. The large configuration of the Sun Fire 15K runs 72 UltraSparc III Processors and costs $4.1 million.

The performance and scalability features of Solaris 8 require changes in hardware. One feature of the new servers Miller is particularly fond of is the ability it gives him to physically pull out defective hardware components such as network adapters and the CPU and replace them while an application is running--a move known as a "hot swap."

"These are bigger, faster boxes," Miller says. He installed the Enterprise 10K servers in July 1999, when he consolidated 43 HP servers the company had acquired as it bought up its office-supply competitors, many of them mom-and-pop operations. Today, Corporate Express delivers an average of $16 million of office and computer products every business day in North America, $3 million of which is ordered through the Internet.

In 1999, no more than 5% of Corporate Express' business was running on strategic applications, Miller says. "The systems didn't scale them," he says. "We weren't sure how we'd handle the volume increases with HP. ... Had we not made the switch to Sun, we wouldn't have been able to scale." So he decided to junk the HP K-class and a few T-class servers, running on Unix, and install a pair of Sun servers. Miller estimates it saved him $10,000 a day.

That initial pair of 10K servers has grown to four, and in June the lease expires for the first two. About 90% of Corporate Express business has been converted to these systems, in addition to new applications. They include an in-house ERP system, InVision, which has grown from 10 CPUs with 10 Gbytes of RAM to 56 CPUs with 56 Gbytes of RAM today; a data warehouse development and test environment; E-Way, its proprietary online ordering tool; an integration platform from webMethods Inc.; and a sales-compensation administration application from Incentive Systems Inc. that began beta testing March 30.