Hewlett-Packard Co’s is making its big Unix servers even more enticing with the launch of two new models at the top of its HP 9000 K-Class family and an extension of its data-center-class T520 Corporate Business Server to 14-way symmetric multiprocessing. The servers are already the most widely chosen destination for high end mainframe users taking the client server escape route. The new HP 9000 K420 server with four processors is claimed to have achieved an audited TPC-C result of 4,939/tpmC at a cost of $232/tpmC, which HP reckons is 50% more transaction processing throughput than IBM Corp’s eight-way RS/6000 J30 and Sun Microsystems Inc’s eight-way Sparcserver 1000E. The new servers, with 120MHz processors, also provide 50% better performance than Digital Equipment Corp’s 2100 5/300 with 300MHz processors, says Hewlett. For technical applications, the new K- class servers offer 1Mb instruction and 1Mb data caches for performance of 8.24 SPECfp95 and 4.61 SPECint95 for the K420/1 uniprocessor and 163 SPECrate_int95, 248 SPECrate_fp95 for the K420/4 four-way multiprocessor. The K220 and K420 use the 120MHz enhanced PA-RISC 7200 processors running HP-UX 10.0, and can be upgraded to future Precision Architecture RISCs, including the 64-bit PA-8000, with a board change. The K220 supports up to 1Gb memory and 3.8Tb of disk storage; aggregate input-output throughput is 128M-bytes per second. The numbers for the K420 are 2Gb; 8.3Tb and 288Mbps. Each goes to four processors with 2Mb cache per CPU, a four-fold increase over the existing cache size in the Models K210 and K410. The company claims its new 14-way HP 9000 T520 delivers 35% better performance than the previous biggest model. The K220 starts at $51,120 and the K420 starts at $73,020 with one processor, 128Mb of memory, 2Gb of disk, CD-ROM, network connection and a two-user HP-UX licence. Additional processors for the K220 and K420 models are $19,000 each and both are available now. The HP 9000 Model T520 begins at $145,000, and additional processors for the machine are priced at $35,000 each.
