MM:
Thanks for that very interesting info! It would make sense that they would now buy their PCs from their 'mother company.'
Read below on another interesting development in the Enterprise arena. Looks like HWP is serious to enter the competition for very high-end server platforms. I am sure they can give the rest of the pack a good run for their money! Interesting also that DEC and NEC are able to jump into gear full-force as well while CPQ/Dell are waiting til next year for eight-way servers.
It does send a strong signal to CPQ/Tandem that they are on the right path with their WinNT server path!
K.
HP Beats Competition To Eight-Way Server (12/02/97; 2:00 p.m. EST)
By Bob Francis, InformationWeek
Hewlett-Packard is convinced that Windows NT is ready for the enterprise. The company will deliver an eight-way SMP Windows NT server later this month, beating its primary competitors to the market by at least six months.
The server, priced at about $33,000 for a version with two 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors with 1 megabyte of cache, will use SMP technology from Axil Computer of Concord, Mass. The price includes site preparation and installation.
HP customers say they are moving to eight-way systems to give their most important applications scalability and reliability. Book retailer Barnes & Noble said it plans to use HP's eight-way servers for its Web servers, as well as database servers in some of its larger stores.
"With the Web, we can't have downtime," said Rick Kish, Barnes & Noble's CIO. "If we're down, the competition is only a mouse-click away."
Scalability is another reason customers are ready for eight-way servers. NationsBank said it is planning on using HP's new systems for applications that tend to grow over time, such as databases and messaging, said Gary McDonnell, a senior systems engineer for NationsBank's global financial technology group in Dallas.
"We'll probably start out with four-way systems and then add more processors when we need them," he said.
Barnes & Noble is also taking a measured approach. "We'll buy the biggest cabinet with the fewest processors, and then if I guess wrong as to our needs in the next few months, I can toss in some new CPUs," Kish said.
Snap-On Tools, in Kenosha, Wis., said it plans to use the high- powered servers as part of its server consolidation program. "We're moving many of our servers into a central data center because our network has become much more reliable. So we're going to use the eight-way systems as we do that," said Dennis Leinter, senior director of IT.
While most other PC server vendors, including Compaq, Dell, and IBM, have opted to wait until next year to deliver eight-way servers, HP, Digital Equipment, and NEC are reacting now to customer demand. NEC is using its own eight-way SMP technology, which it has been selling in Japan, while Digital is licensing technology from NCR for its server.
"Customers were moving ahead much faster with NT applications and needed the scalability that eight-way servers can bring them," said Maria Cannon, general manager of enterprise NetServer operations at HP, in Palo Alto, Calif. "They clearly said they wanted this."
Copyright (c) CMP Media, 1997.
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