HP and Oracle have been trading barbs in recent months following a spat over HP's ousting of former CEO Mark Hurd, who is now working for Oracle. Outspoken Oracle CEO Larry Ellison resumed hostilities last week when lobbed a bombshell at HP during a press briefing about his company's new record-setting SPARC Supercluster. HP isn't going to take the abuse lying down and has issued a sharply-worded response, which they sent us today.

During the Supercluster briefing, Oracle compared HP's servers to a turtle and described the company as being "vulnerable" in the market. Citing his company's internal benchmarks, Ellison contended that the new Supercluster offers a 66 percent better price/performance ratio than HP's comparable offering.

HP touts its number one status, highlights the continuing growth of its server business, and characterizes Oracle's acquisition of Sun as a costly dead-end. HP also dismisses Oracle's benchmarks, contending that marketshare is the measure that really matters.

"Our Enterprise Storage and Servers segment saw 25% revenue growth year over year during Q4 FY2010, and HP was the only major UNIX vendor that reported server growth," an HP spokesperson told us. "Larry Ellison bought a money-losing business that had steady market share declines for years, and which still ranks at the bottom of the market. Customers aren't fooled by outdated benchmarks, no matter what Oracle says. HP's market share results prove it. Sun customers are running to HP in droves because they recognize we deliver superior technology, performance and pricing."

Them's fighting words. Even though Oracle and HP publicly made nice in September and prevented their dispute over Hurd from escalating to litigation, it looks like there is still some serious tension on both sides. As we said in our coverage of the Supercluster launch, it's hard to evaluate the sweeping performance claims of enterprise hardware vendors without independent benchmarks. We are waiting to see some third-party validation of Ellison's big talk.

In terms of enterprise computing marketshare ranking, IDC's numbers have HP in the top spot with around a third of the market, followed closely by IBM. Oracle comes in fourth, lagging behind Dell.