Shooting from the hip, US sources have let it be known that Hewlett-Packard Co’s latest three and four-way multi-processing RISC Unix servers – officially under wraps for another couple of weeks – are being aimed squarely at Sequent Computer Systems Inc and its Intel Corp 80486-based transaction processing Symmetry line, plus DEC and IBM commercial systems. Hewlett-Packard is finding the commercial transaction processing market – both for its Unix and proprietary servers – tough going, and is having to manoeuvre in a space where customer spending is already bared to the bone, against Sequent, IBM and an increasingly aggressive DEC, when pitching for business. Hewlett’s 9000 Series 870S models 300 and 400, with three and four PA RISC processors respectively, are due early next year and come with up to 760Mb RAM and 500Gb disk, supporting up to 2,000 users at the top-end. They extend the performance of the previous dual-CPU model 200, and are reckoned by US insiders – unofficially, as the results have yet to be audited – to perform 200 transactions per second according to the TPC-A benchmark suite, running the Informix Software Inc database and Unix System Labs’ Tuxedo transaction processing monitor. A minimum performance mark of 165 is being bandied for the servers, which compares to the 164 transactions per second offered by Sequent’s Symmetry 2000/700 system configured with 16 Intel 80486 CPUs running Oracle. In the meantime, Sequent will up the ante come January, when it will begin to offer 50MHz versions of the 80486 CPU in its Symmetry systems.
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