Hewlett-Packard Co has duly launched its three-and four-way symmetric multiprocessing Unix machines, the HP 9000 870S/300 and 400 (CI No 1,810), claiming that under the TPC-A benchmark, they are the industry’s fastest Unix computers for business applications, matching the performance of IBM Corp 3090 mainframes at a quarter the cost. The 870S/400 with four Precision Architecture RISCs is claimed to do 173 TPC-A transactions per second with nearly 2,000 active users. The company also has 2.7Gb and 5.4Gb disk arrays to provide more than 500Gb of on-line storage, and offers the fastest back-up for a Unix system with its new Omniback/Turbo, supporting back-up and recovery speeds of up to 12Gb per hour, with capacity of 80Gb. The 9000 870/300 starts at $440,000, the 400 at $530,000, and are available immediately. The disk arrays are $28,675 to $53,600. The company also extended its server line with the HP 9000 Models 867S and 877S, and reported that its Model 817S offers price-performance of $11,830 per transaction per second using TPC-A. New 64Mb memory modules double maximum system memory on the servers to 384Mb, and is now making a new Digital Audio Tape drive with 2Gb capacity standard on its 8X7 servers; there is also a CD-ROM option for them. The HP 9000 Models 867S and 877S begin at $112,500 and $140,000 respectively, which include the processor, operating system, memory, networking and standard peripherals such as the 2Gb drive.The 867S is rated at 74.9 TPS and $15,400 per TPS. Model 877S israted at 74.9 TPS and $15,800 per TPS, and there is also a new HP 700/60 terminal at $540. All the products are available now.
