Mar 7, 2002 : HP Extends UNIX Server Offerings

📅 March 7, 2002 - Hewlett-Packard Company (hp.com) announced yesterday newdevelopments in all segments of its UNIX server lines. The announcementincludes record-breaking high-end server benchmark results, customer winsand multiple industry awards for HP's midrange servers and the introductionof new high-performance entry-level and midrange servers, the company said.

HP has raised the stakes in its entry-level UNIX space by introducing thePA-8700 processor into both its one- and two-way UNIX servers while droppingprices as much as 58 percent to start at an estimated U.S. street price ofless than $1,000. The entry-level HP Servers rp2430 and rp2470 are designedfor business and Internet applications for distributed sites and branchoffices of large enterprises, as well as telcos, service providers andmid-market companies.
Based on HP's PA-8700 processor, the HP Servers rp2430 and rp2470 areaggressively priced against comparable application servers from competitorsSun Microsystems. The HP Server rp2430 replaces the A400 and the HP Serverrp2470 replaces the A500. Both systems are available now for ordering.
"The HP Servers rp2430 and rp2470 offer the best performance, highavailability and performance density of any entry-level UNIX solution on themarket," said Mark Hudson, director of worldwide marketing, HP BusinessSystems and Technology Organization. "Integrating the PA-8700 processor intothese products and introducing this competitive new pricing delivers valueto customers that competitors can't match."
HP has improved its offerings in the midrange UNIX server market bylaunching the new HP Server rp7410, which brings into the 8-way spacehigh-end HP Superdome server features and functionality found in the 16-wayHP rp8400 midrange server. HP has a growing customer base for the HP Serverrp8400 since its introduction last September. This list of customersincludes American Airlines, Cleveland Clinic Health Systems, Sony, Good YearTire and Rubber, and Toyota, among others.
HP has improved upon the rp8400's price/performance ratio on the TPC-Cbenchmark. At $14.37/tpmC, the HP Server rp8400 sets a higher standard formidrange UNIX price/performance and beats IBM and Sun's results by more than60 percent, according to the company's tests.
The HP Server rp8400 took top honors at the annual Server I/O IndustryAwards, held on February 6 at the conclusion of the Server I/O Conferenceand Tradeshow. The server was voted Product of the Year for 2001, edging outproducts from five other finalists in an award showcase for the best newproduct that became generally available in 2001, excluding upgrades toexisting products.
HP has also improved the performance of its high-end HP Superdome servers,which are on track to double transaction performance by next year. Forexample, HP recently broke its own record, set in December 2001, on the3-tier SAP Standard Assemble-To-Order Application Benchmark by 10 percent.The HP Superdome server achieved 144,090 business processed assembly ordersper hour.
HP also recently introduced a 2 Gb per second fibre channel host bus adaptorthat doubles the performance of the previous HBA without raising the price.HP's fibre channel HBA provides customers with connectivity to storage areanetworks, which are experiencing tremendous growth in enterprise storagenetworking environments. HP now offers end-to-end 2 Gb SAN solutions thatinclude servers, storage, switches and consulting services. These solutionsare available today for HP Superdome and other PCI-based HP UNIX servers.