Hewlett-Packard Co, which has just bounced a vast bank of mainframes at Pacific Telesis Group Inc into oblivion with its high-end Unix servers, is not letting up in its onslaught on the dinosaurs. The latest weapon in the fight to consign mainframes to the status of Jurassic Park curiosities is the HP 3000 Series 988LX/RX business server, claimed to offer nearly 50% better performance than previous models; it comes with less expensive user licences. It is pitched at small- to medium-sized companies that are adding applications or evolving to client-server environments. It uses the HP PA-7100LC/100 processor clocked at 96MHz and provides an estimated 230 transactions per second; it can support up to 1,000 users simultaneously, 100 more than the 9×8 family previously supported. Cache is quadrupled to an enormous 1Mb to speed response time. The firm now offers eight-, 20-, 32-, 40-, 64-, 100-, 160- and 256-user-licence increments which can save users up to 40%.It can be ordered pre-loaded with Novell Inc NetWare and 802.3 Ethernet; new clients supported across the 9×8 family with MPE/iX 5.0 include the Macintosh and the 33MHz HP Windows Client. The HP 3000 Series 988 server is priced from $90,000 to $147,700, and it is shipping now.
