Hewlett-Packard Co says it’s already got a competitive trade-in program aimed at those Siemens Nixdorf Informationssystemes AG customers who may decide to jump ship following SNI’s plans to dump the MIPS RISC and instead build 64-bit Intel Corp Merced systems running Solaris x86. HP says any SNI customer with a big- endian Reliant Unix system now knows they’ll have to migrate to little-endian Solaris x86 on IA-64 system in future. HP says it’s the same big-endian to little-endian migration that Sun’s Solaris Sparc users have to make to take advantage of Solaris x86. The shock for Siemens customers will be when they realize what this means. Application rewrites for all their existing source code to handle the change in data layout, followed by an actual data migration from big-endian to little-endian.
