Barely one week after IBM unveiled its latest midrange Unix offering, Hewlett-Packard
upped the ante Tuesday when it announced the HP Server rp8400, a midrange Unix server it says is ideally suited for the demanding workloads and return-on-investment priorities of enterprises, service providers, and high-performance technical computing.
The HP Server rp8400 is currently available worldwide. It is priced starting at $124,000.
The rp8400 is being marketed to data centers with the idea that it is designed to meet the demanding workload and availability needs of this space.
According to HP, the rp8400 delivers price/performance and features that provide unmatched scalability, availability and flexibility, while offering enterprises significant operational cost savings. The rp8400 provides lasting value and unparalleled investment protection for key applications, such as server consolidation, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, computer-aided engineering, customer relationship management, e-commerce, and billing.
The rp8400 runs on HP-UX 11i and uses up to 16 PA-RISC 8700 processors. The CPU board is designed to upgrade to future generations of PA-RISC and Intel Itanium Processor Family processors.
“With the HP Server rp8400, HP is redefining the industry’s midrange Unix landscape,” said Duane Zitzner, president, HP Computing Systems. “Companies redefined the 24-hour delivery service by improving processes and refining operational excellence, and brought expensive counter-to-counter airline delivery down to consumer friendly prices. Likewise, the HP Server rp8400 provides high-end server capabilities to customers at midrange prices.”
According to HP, the rp8400 delivers the best performance of any midrange server, based on the TPC-C benchmark, with 140,240 tpmC. This surpasses IBM’s new p660 Model 6M1 midrange server by 33 percent. At $16.28 per tpmC, the rp8400 also sets a new standard for midrange Unix price/performance.
HP also cites statistics in how the system handles Java applications. With a SPECjbb2000 performance result of 118,547 operations per second, the rp8400 outperforms Sun Microsystems’ Sunfire 6800 by nearly 10 percent while using one-third fewer processors. For technical applications, the rp8400 boasted SPEC CFP2000 and CINT2000 rates of 71 and 98.2, respectively, with peak rates for 16 processors.
