The latest boost to Hewlett-Packard Co’s top end server models should cover the performance requirements of up to 85% of current mainframe users, company officials were saying at the launch yesterday of the HP 9000 890 and HP 3000 992 series of corporate business servers; the company claims 400 transactions per second – besting more than 90% of IBM Corp’s installed mainframes at a three-year cost of owenership of $2.7m against $15m for a comparable IBM machine – and one third the cost of a Digital Equipment Corp VAX 9000 of comparable power. The new multiprocessors offer a 70% performance increase over the previous 9000 870 and 3000 980 models, coming with up to four Precision Architecture RISCs and the new Hewlett-Packard Precision Buffer input-output architecture. The HP 9000 Unix models support up to 3,000 users, while HP 3000 models support up to 2,300, because of the current limitation in the proprietary MPE/XL operating system on multiprocessors. There are four models in each range, the 100, 200, 300 and 400. HP 9000 Model 890s come with 128Mb to 7Gb of memory and up to 600Gb of disk, with an entry level price of $340,000, from October. The HP 3000 Model 992s have 192Mb standard memory up to 2Gb and 690Gb of maximum disk, from September. There is also an new HP 3000 model 990, offering a lower price. The 890-400 is rated at 300 transactions per second. Hewlett-Packard promises to continue its major performance push by launching systems with up to 16 processors over the next year or so, and is promising 128 processor models, with the help from its new partner Convex Computer Corp, by the late 1990s; it aims to double performance every year. While current models use existing versions of the RISC, they will be upgraded to Hewlett-Packard’s new generation 7100 chip in the future. The first system based on 7100, a mid-range server, is expected to be launched next month.
