Compaq First to Ship Powerful 8-way Servers; ProLiant 8000 and 8500 Demonstrate Benefits of Standards-Based Computing Driving Quick Customer Acceptance - Product Announcement

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, August 30, 1999

Following last week's announcement to drive standards-based computing further into the data center and to expand into new markets, Compaq Computer Corporation Monday announced it is the first vendor to ship 8-way servers based on the Profusion architecture, with its ProLiant 8000 and ProLiant 8500 servers.

Fueled by strong customer demand, Compaq will also be the first vendor shipping 8-way servers in volume, meeting needs across a broad set of applications and industries, including Finance, Energy, Healthcare and the emerging Application Service Provider market. Among the first ProLiant 8-way customers are The Northern Trust, Enron, Sharp HealthCare, and Digex.

Bobby Patrick, Vice President of Strategy and Product Development, DIGEX said, "The deployment of ProLiant 8-way servers in our IT infrastructure means we are always open for business. We are able to provide our customers with the applications they need to realize the benefits of e-commerce. With the deployment of Compaq 8-way servers we get significant cost savings. In fact, we are going to be purchasing more units."

Pricing and Investment Protection

The ProLiant 8000 and ProLiant 8500 have the performance to meet large enterprises most demanding needs and with prices starting below $14,000, companies can purchase these highly scalable servers which easily grow with their business. The ProLiant 8000 with two Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processors, 512 KB of Level 2 Cache and 256 MB RAM starts at $22,500. The ProLiant 8500 with one Pentium III Xeon 550 MHz processor, 512 KB of Level 2 Cache and 256 MB RAM starts at $13,950.

Fulfilling Compaq's commitment to deliver 8-way upgradability to current 4-way ProLiant 7000 customers, Compaq also announced the pending availability of new 8-way upgrade kits. The anticipated starting price for the 8-way upgrade is $9,090. All pricing is based on U.S. estimated street prices. Reseller prices may vary. The ProLiant 8000 and ProLiant 8500 will enable upgrades to future technologies to continue to offer customers superior investment protection. Prices for the 8-way ProLiant servers range from $20,000 to $80,000 for configured systems.

High Availability Features Combined with Business Critical Services The ProLiant 8000 and ProLiant 8500 have the high availability features to meet 24x7 application needs. As part of its comprehensive 8-way ProLiant solution, Compaq provides extensive experience in delivering Business-Critical Services to customers. Specifically, Compaq offers easy to purchase CarePaq service modules that range from 24x7 uptime and 4-hour response time guarantees (1), to business critical expertise for planning, deploying, maintaining and managing the most demanding e-commerce environments.

"For a financial services company like Northern Trust, the deployment of 8-way servers provide us not only greater performance but also significant cost savings," said Jerry Helton, Vice-President Distributive Systems, The Northern Trust Company. "As well, the 8-way server architecture provides us with greater ease of maintenance and upgrading."

Compaq Innovation

Co-developed by Compaq and Intel, the 8-way Profusion Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) architecture provides near linear scalability for 8-processor servers running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, Novell NetWare, SCO UnixWare, and Linux. This scalability, together with the exceptional performance of the memory and I/O subsystems, enables systems to maximize the productivity of the most demanding enterprise applications such as e-commerce, data warehousing, web serving, terminal serving and electronic mail.

"With the release of the ProLiant 8500 8-way server from Compaq, Enron will be able to better leverage the NT platform for mission critical operations," said John P. Tollefsen, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Integration, Enron Corporation. "We are excited about the possibilities for the 8500 and feel it will enable us to stay on the leading edge of technology innovation."

Smart Array Storage Solutions

Monday Compaq also announced a new Smart Array 4250ES Controller, designed specifically for the new high-performance 8-way ProLiant 8000 server. The controller is based on Compaq's innovative 64-bit performance architecture and Compaq's unique hot-pluggable, cable-free design. For higher availability, customers can add a second controller for fail-over redundancy. The controller is compatible with all Smart Array controllers for simpler, more cost-effective upgrades. The Smart Array family of products offers unparalleled data and software compatibility for today's demanding market.

Powerful Benchmark Results

The ProLiant 8000 posted 40,013 transactions per minute (tpmC) at just $18.86/tpmC running Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 on Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition. This TPC-C benchmark represents a 78 percent increase in performance over the highest number ever achieved on an Intel-based 4-way server. For additional information on benchmark results, visit http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/benchmarks/index.html