Determined to keep ahead of a pack that includes Digital Equipment Corp and Silicon Graphics Inc, plus the PowerPC and Pentium crowd, Hewlett-Packard Co will this week fill in a few chinks in its armour, announcing some new mid-range HP 9000 series 700 models that use the PA-7150 RISC, an enhanced version of the 99MHz PA-7100 that can be clocked at up to 150MHz. The 735/125, at $40,000 with a 19 colour screen, 32Mb RAM and 1Gb disk, is rated at 136 SPECint92 and 201 SPECfp92 and will ship next quarter. In like-with-like comparisons, Hewlett-Packard reckons the 735/125 has DEC’s Alpha 3000 AXP Model 600 beat by 16% on integer and 20% on floating point performance, and delivers 80% more three-dimensional vectors per second than Silicon Graphics Inc’s Indigo2 Extreme R4400. Hewlett-Packard’s 125MHz engine is also available as a board-swap for current 90MHz model 735 users at $9,100, while a 125MHz 755 is due later in the year. There’s also a new version of the 99MHz box, the 735CL, optimised for clustering, which will go to 125MHz next quarter. The 735CL comes in four- or eight-node clusters with Ethernet or FDDI links. Hewlett-Packard is teaming with Oracle Corp for a version of Oracle7 Parallel Server which will be running on HP 9000 Series 800 servers by autumn. The two have already developed a distributed lock manager for clustered Series 800 servers and will integrate the Oracle7 Parallel Server with Hewlett-Packard’s Cluster Monitor software tools and utilities. Hewlett-Packard says it has also integrated the Computing Centre Management System component of SAP AG’s SAP R/3 application with OpenView, so that OpenView Operations Centre can collect information and messages from SAP R/3 and pass network information to R/3.
