According to its own figures, the new Hewlett-Packard Co four-way K400 server offers a 33% performance advantage in terms of transactions per second over its nearest rival, Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha 2100/4, for a similar price. DEC’s performance is let down by its use of the Peripheral Component Interconnect bus, claims the Palo Alto company, which has upgraded its own technology to the dual HP High-Speed Connect bus. Hewlett-Packard has not ruled out use of Peripheral Component Interconnect altogether however, and says PCI systems may appear among its future low-end offerings at some stage. Customers with existing peripherals can opt to use the old HP-PB bus on the new systems if they wish, although it is only a third the speed. Meanwhile, Hewlett-Packard’s lower-end G, H and I Series of servers will eventually be superseded by the K Series, and the company has no current plans to upgrade them to the 7200 chip. The T500s, however, are a different matter. The company’s runway bus technology has already been rolled down to the K Series, and T500s will be pushed upwards to the new chips over the next year. Although its competitors, especially Sun Microsystems Inc, which has bitter experience behind it, are hoping to make capital out of Hewlett-Packard’s move to the Unix System V.4 file system with the upgrade from HP-UX 9.0 to 10.0, Hewlett is claiming that the move will be easier than the transition from 8.0 to 9.0 was.
Overtake IBM in mid-range
The reason given for this is the availability of its Fast Transition Links technology, which enables uncompiled HP-UX 9.0 code to run on top of 10.0 without any performance penalty, it says. Continuing to pillage the proprietary systems software base, Hewlett-Packard has now chalked up Dassault Systemes SA’s Catia computer-aided design and manufacture package, best known from IBM Corp mainframes, and System Software Associates Inc’s AS/400 stalwart BPCS, Business Planning & Control System suite. Hewlett-Packard says its goal is to overtake IBM as the number one mid-range systems supplier by 1997. It estimates that IBM currently has 24% of the market for AS/400s and RS/6000s compared to its 11%. It expects IBM’s figure to remain fairly constant during that timeframe, with a big shift to RS/6000s. By the year 2000, says Hewlett-Packard, it will be the number one server supplier. Six months into its ASsault campaign to cajole AS/400 users on to its HP-UX servers, and now also armed with its new PA-7200 K-Class symmetric multiprocessing servers, it claims to have turned hundreds of AS/400 and System/36 customers to its products. It says it has now got product development and marketing relationships with 13 of the top 15 AS/400 independent software vendors. Hewlett-Packard says Renault SA replaced 180 System/36s with 70 HP 9000s although it remains an AS/400 customer too; Laidlaw Transit Inc migrated its third party financial applications from AS/400 to RS/6000 and then to HP 9000 servers; while HP 9000 servers beat out AS/400s at Bristol-Myers-Squibb’s Matrix Essentials division.
