By William Fellows
Hewlett-Packard Co claims its new mid-range N4000 server announced yesterday as the eight-way N4000 provides it with a $40bn Unix revenue opportunity over the next four years and changes mid-range computing, according to chairman Lew Platt. HP, which is pushing the $50,000 to $250,000 N-Class for web and e-services, claims it has opened the book on Internet Chapter 2, and expects to sell $10bn of N4000 kit over the period. The rest comes from services, storage and add-on sales which now bring in $3 in for every $1 spent on hardware. HP claims the server offers twice the performance at half the cost of comparable mid-range systems, notably Sun’s E3500 and E4500 and IBM RS/6000 S70. HP claims to have done $6bn system sales – $24bn in total – in four years of K-Class sales. K-Class will remain on the price list as it runs the 32-bit HP-UX 10.20 release. N-Class is a 64-bit 11.0 only platform.
The N4000, codenamed Prelude uses 360MHz or 440MHz PA-8500 RISCs, but its key technology is a chipset enabling users to upgrade to IA-64 processors – big-endian or little endian to run HP-UX or Windows NT respectively – by swapping out CPU board and bus converter. That technology, HP says, will be used in future systems both up and down the product line line and will specifically enable it to offer HP-UX and NT under one hood in the Superdome follow-on to the current high-end V-Class line of servers. The opportunity will only begin to be realized with McKinley, the second generation IA-64 due in 2002, now widely regarded as the real 64-bit Intel part for enterprise systems.
HP expects Merced, a volume play, to be predominantly an ISV platform. N4000’s memory controller sports two 1.9Gbps IA-64 system buses. Attached to each bus are two ‘Runway’ bus converters; each uses a single VLSI chip and supports two PA- 8500s via dedicated 960Mbps Runway buses – the same bus used in the K-Class. To upgrade to IA-64 the chip and bus converters and Runway are replaced. The same system components can be used. I/O controllers are linked to each system bus providing 5.6Gbps, claimed to deliver twice the throughput of Sun’s architecture. The PA-8500 – an 0.25 micron shrink of the PA-8000/8200 design – achieves 52 SPECfp95 and 32 SPECint95. The system includes fault detection with a separate support processor, integrated WebQoS for managing web traffic, local and remote management capabilities and Ignite/UX for replication and network start-up.
HP has a significant opportunity to leverage Unix and NT with a single system approach if it can pitch a good marketing campaign. Its NT-over-Unix messages of a couple of years ago cost it considerable momentum in the Unix market which was mercilessly exploited by Sun. Although Sun’s single-minded Unix focus is paying dividends HP – or other vendors – need only to get a couple of good quarters under their belt peddling the Unix-NT message before momentum should be established. IBM Corp is already achieving some success by peddling Unix and NT layered under a common services strategy. Nick Earle, now chief marketing officer for enterprise solutions is charged by HP with turning these messages on. He says 20% of all system orders now include Unix and NT procurement. It could even turn out that Linux will turn out to be a leading play on Intel, Earle says, which is why it has no interest in Monterey64 at this point.
At 24,139 SPECweb96, HP claims the N4000 delivers the highest web performance on the market, although at 2,800 SPECweb96 as a uniprocessor it already lags Sun’s E450 uniprocessor workgroup server which comes in at 2,936. HP compares N4000’s $48,000 entry price with the $6.8m IBM charges for the S/390, the previous SPECweb96 record holder at 21,591 SPECweb96. It must be noted that IBM’s S70 server already achieves 20,200 SPECweb96.
On transaction performance, HP claims an eight-way N4000 performs 49,308 tpmC on the TPC-C benchmark at $57 per tpm putting it in ninth place in TPC-C performance rankings. Sun’s eight-way E3500 achieves 21,871 tpmC at $77.56 per tpm. HP claims that an N-Class box configured to perform twice the E3500’s tpmC costs $123,000 versus Sun’s $218,000 tag. Moreover while an eight-way N4000 costs $267,000, Sun requires a 24-way E6500 costing $610,000 to achieve the same TPC-C performance. HP says N4000 achieves 99.8% single systems availability – 18 hours of downtime a year – with 99.95% hardware availability (four hours downtime a year).
Sun’s immediate response is that HP’s PA, IA-64, HP-UX and NT messages are confused and will give it an opportunity sell to HP’s customers. Sun says it is the low-end and high-end segments which are driving the market currently, not the $50,000 to $250,000 space. HP says 65% of its Unix server business is in this mid-range band and that it is also the sweet sport of the industry for Sun et al. It clearly does not think the sector is a no-mans land. HP is trumpeting N4000’s small rackmount footprint but Sun says the stack and rack brigade, including ISPs are buying sub-$20,000 boxes, not $50,000 units. HP says N4000 is not aimed at this space. At the high-end HP now claims to have shipped 2,000 V-Class systems versus Sun’s 1,100 StarFires.
