HP Announces New, High-performance NetServer LS Series; New High-end NetServer Line from HP Combines Single to Four-way Multiprocessing with Dual PCI Peer Buses and Intel Pentium 133-MHz for a Next-generation Performance Platform

Business Wire, June 12, 1995

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 12, 1995-- Hewlett-Packard Company today introduced the HP NetServer LS Series -- high-performance network servers scaleable from single-processor Intel Pentium/75 systems to quad symmetric multiprocessor Pentium/100 and Pentium/133 systems with dual PCI Peer buses. These high-end servers provide a fault-tolerant platform for high-end, business-critical LAN environments.

"This new series is one of the first Pentium 133MHz multiprocessor series available in the industry," said James P. McDonnell, worldwide marketing manager of HP's Network Server Division. "High-performance processors and a system architecture that's designed from the ground up deliver the performance needed to meet or beat the requirements of the most demanding businesses."

The HP NetServer LS2 5/100 and 5/133, HP's dual-processor Pentium models, offer customers industry-leading price/performance. With TPC benchmarks that break the 400-tpsB level, the NetServer LS2 5/100 achieved an outstanding 371 tpsB with an associated cost under $300 per tpsB. The NetServer LS2 5/133 delivered an impressive 419 tpsB at the low cost of $259 per tpsB.

The introduction of the NetServer LS makes HP the first major computer vendor in the industry to offer a complete line of PCI servers for the LAN environment. PCI offers users the benefits of next-generation I/O performance. In addition, because the cost of PCI technology is less than that of EISA and because the plug-and-play features of PCI make the NetServer LS series much easier to configure and manage, both the cost of purchase and the cost of ownership are reduced -- especially important in an age of networking-technology proliferation. With the wide-scale deployment of networking technologies, these have rapidly become major customer needs in the industry that are being met by PCI technology.

BREAKTHROUGH SYSTEM PERFORMANCE

The NetServer LS architecture was designed from the ground up for high performance. The system offers a balanced I/O and CPU/memory system, industry-leading performance and investment protection for customers:

o A 64-bit clock independent system bus -- results in the

highest performance possible since each device on the

bus operates at its own maximum clock speed.

o Dual PCI Peer buses -- offer users industry-leading

performance through an I/O bus architecture that uses

concurrent PCI bus operation with intelligent I/O

buffering and dual access to a 64-bit system bus.

o Dual, integrated PCI fast and wide SCSI-2 controllers

-- increase I/O performance by implementing I/O

parallelism with the increased bandwidth of wide SCSI.

o Dedicated Level 2 caches -- offer industry-leading

price/performance for customers deploying high-end

multiprocessing servers through a standard, dedicated

second-level cache of 1MB for each processor.

o MPS support -- offers users the peace of mind that

operating systems and applications will conform to the

industry's Multiprocessing Specification (MPS) today

and in the future.

HIGH AVAILABILITY FOR CRITICAL APPLICATIONS

The high performance of HP's NetServer LS Series includes fault-tolerant features that ensure data integrity and high system uptime to meet the high-availability requirements of business-critical environments. The new hot-swap disk subsystem has a dual SCSI backplane that makes internal disk duplexing easy and allows the server to continue working while failed drives are being replaced. This hot-swap subsystem also is equipped with an intelligent bus for managing the subsystem and its hard drives.

NetServer LS array models offer a dual-channel PCI disk-array controller that supports fast and wide SCSI drives in RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6. In addition to providing higher performance through PCI bus and better processor utilization, this PCI array controller features the automatic hot-spare drive architecture, which, in the event of a drive failure, automatically reconstructs data on a spare drive.

In addition to these storage features, each system comes standard with error checking and correcting (ECC) memory that is expandable to 768MB. The ECC memory includes management capabilities that log memory errors and tell administrators that they need to take action. The NetServer LS Series also includes an Automatic Server Restart feature, which automatically reactivates the server in the event that the network operating system hangs.

INDUSTRY ALLIANCES FOR BUSINESS-CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTS

The NetServer LS supports industry-leading network operating systems, including Banyan VINES, IBM OS/2 Warp and LAN Server, Microsoft(R) Windows NT Server, Novell NetWare, Novell UnixWare and SCO OpenServer. In addition, the NetServer LS Series will support industry-leading applications, such as Oracle7, Sybase SQL Server, Microsoft BackOffice, SAP-AG's R/3 and Lotus(R) Notes.

"We believe the HP NetServer LS series is the ideal power engine to support very demanding applications, such as SAP-AG's R/3 running on Windows NT," said McDonnell. "Such applications demand exceptional availability as well as easy-to-do network management because such applications are essential to the enterprise. Further, those applications frequently involve data-center downsizing."