Hewlett-Packard Co has confirmed it will ship early units of its 64-bit 180Mhz PA-8000-based T600 high-end data centers servers in April, replacing its existing T520 series servers. Volume shipments of systems, priced around $100,000 and upwards, will follow in May. The T600s will run the company’s 32-bit Unix operating system, HP-UX version 10.3. Hewlett-Packard says a top- end 12-way configuration has been benchmarked at around 17,000 transactions per minute; and will support 32Gb RAM. Initial shipments of the HP T600 will be limited to 4Gb memory, but September will see the launch of version 11.0 of HP-UX, its 64- bit Unix implementation, which will support larger memory configurations. It’s currently working with the database vendors on Very Large Memory configurations that will supercharge 64-bit database performance running on HP-UX 11.0. The real benefits of having a 64-bit operating system will only be realized when major applications such as SAP R/3 have been re-engineered using 64-bit instructions.
