Well, Hewlett-Packard Co obviously has stirred up a hornet’s nest in claiming two weeks ago that it was the leader at the high end of the Unix market with over 2,000 of its V class servers shipped since November 1997. IBM came back and said that it has shipped over 4,000 of its RS/6000 Raven and Blackbird servers since they started shipping two summers ago and added that it has over 5,000 RS/6000 SP parallel servers in the field with over 50,000 processor nodes.
Now SGI says that since it started shipping its Origin servers in 1996, it has put 20,000 of them in the field. While not being specific, odds are that plenty of those Origin servers are in the same K class of HP’s Unix lineup, so it is not exactly a fair comparison. The hubbub just points out the fact that even though, generally speaking, there are lots of similarities among the RISC-Unix server vendors, the many small differences between machines within each vendor’s multiple product lines as well as across vendor’s lines makes comparisons of server shipments, installed base and revenues problematic.
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