Servers

HP Beefs Up Mid-Range UNIX Mix

Barely one week after IBM unveiled its latest mid-range UNIX offering, Hewlett-Packard upped the ante as it goes after this lucrative segment of the market.

by ISP-Planet Staff [September 21, 2001]

This week Hewlett-Packard debuted its Server rp8400, a midrange UNIX server it says is ideally suited for the demanding workloads and return-on-investment priorities of enterprises, service providers, and high-performance technical computing.

The rp8400 is being marketed to data centers with the idea that it is designed to meet the demanding workload and availability needs of this space.

According to HP, the rp8400 delivers a price for performance bundle that provides unmatched scalability, availability and flexibility, while offering enterprises significant operational cost savings. Additionally, the rp8400 can fuel intense enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, computer-aided engineering, customer relationship management, e-commerce, and billing functions.

The rp8400 (left) runs on HP-UX 11i and uses up to 16 PA-RISC 8700 processors. The CPU board is designed to upgrade to future generations of PA-RISC and Intel Itanium Processor Family processors.

Duane Zitzner, HP president of computing systems, said the HP Server rp8400 is redefining the industry's midrange UNIX landscape.

"Companies redefined the 24-hour delivery service by improving processes and refining operational excellence, and brought expensive counter-to-counter airline delivery down to consumer friendly prices," Zitzner explained. "Likewise, the HP Server rp8400 provides high-end server capabilities to customers at midrange prices."

According to HP, the rp8400 delivers the best performance of any midrange server, based on the TPC-C benchmark, with 140,240 tpmC. This surpasses IBM's new p660 Model 6M1 midrange server by 33 percent. At $16.28 per tpmC, the rp8400 also sets a new standard for midrange UNIX price/performance.

Other notable features include:

• Scalable performance from 2-16 processors
• High-availability hardware design and event monitoring
• Flexibility to handle the highly variable demands of today's financial industry
• HP-UX 11i investment protection for UNIX and Itanium processors
• Mission-critical always-on services
• Innovative financing, including utility pricing

HP also cites statistics in how the system handles Java applications. With a SPECjbb2000 performance result of 118,547 operations per second, the rp8400 outperforms Sun Microsystems' Sunfire 6800 by nearly 10 percent while using one-third fewer processors. For technical applications, the rp8400 boasted SPEC CFP2000 and CINT2000 rates of 71 and 98.2, respectively, with peak rates for 16 processors.

Pricing and availability
The HP Server rp8400 is currently available worldwide. It is priced starting at $124,000, although actual price may vary.

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