The retail banking services company, which has been providing transactional backend support to credit unions since 1981, initially purchased a storage solution from Sun before deciding to upgrade its servers.

To meet the demands of its customers, which include the credit union arm of Qantas and the Australian Defence Force, Data Action approached its incumbent supplier HP to add four new servers to its existing six.

Data Action CEO Brian McCulloch said HP had to demonstrate a lifecycle for its hardware and prove it was compatible with the existing environment. "HP recommended we switch to its new Itanium technology which didn't really satisfy our needs; we don't want blue-sky technology," he said.

"There was no proven growth path for the future and at the time of benchmarking it required a move to an unproven release of Sybase.

"Sun's proposal supported an array of applications including network infrastructure and database workloads, ideal for our heavy transaction loads."