New HP 9000 N-Class Enterprise Servers Power Leading Business-to-Business Web Travel Service - Product Information

Edge: Work-Group Computing Report, Dec 20, 1999

Hewlett-Packard Company Tuesday announced that GetThere.com, a business-to-business Web travel procurement company (formerly Internet Travel Network), has chosen HP 9000 N-Class Enterprise Servers to run the database for its business-critical Internet service.

GetThere.com, which has been delivering travel services over the World Wide Web since 1995, is a supplier of Web-based travel procurement solutions to business customers and airlines. GetThere.com said it implemented the N-Class systems to provide superior performance and scalability to support the increasing volume of requests to its databases.

The N-Class Makes a Difference

According to GetThere.com, an increasing volume of customer information required more processing power for GetThere.com's Oracle relational database and from the servers that run it. The move to HP 9000 N-Class Enterprise Servers has significantly increased the company's database capacity.

"We chose HP 9000 N-Class servers and the HP-UX(1) 11 operating environment because of their scalability and performance, and especially their ability to handle Oracle database requests," said Eric Sirkin, vice president of Engineering and Operations at GetThere.com. "The HP N-Class servers are ideally suited to run relational databases such as Oracle, which is important to our business. We need massive scalability to keep pace with the growth of customer information on our database servers associated with Internet travel booking. HP's N-Class is the only solution we found that gave us the confidence we need to accommodate increased business demands by providing outstanding performance today plus headroom to grow with a strong upgrade path to future technologies, both PA-RISC(2) and the emerging IA-64 architecture."

The HP 9000 N-Class Enterprise Server is a midrange system ideally suited for business-critical Internet solutions. The server features up to eight of the world's fastest processors, HP's 64-bit PA-8500, and includes many standard features to help companies harness the power of the Internet. It delivers outstanding performance across a number of workload environments.

The conversion to the HP N-Class was completed in June, and since then the company has realized major increases in efficiency.

"GetThere.com handles a huge number of transactions per day," said Patrick Rogers, worldwide marketing manager for HP's Business Critical Computing Business Unit. "The mammoth throughput advantages they've achieved on their database server with the N-Class really showcase the fact that it is an ideal platform for business-critical Internet applications."

HP is uniquely positioned to prepare enterprises and service providers for the next chapter of the Internet. HP's e-services strategy defines the vision for computing in the future and lays the groundwork for delivering the enabling technologies and solutions today.

GetThere.com is a provider of Internet-based travel procurement and supply services primarily for businesses and travel suppliers. GetThere.com's services include ITN Global Manager for business travel booking, ITN FlightRez for travel suppliers, and services for Internet-based content and electronic commerce providers and travel agencies. The company's customers include businesses with significant travel expenditures such as Chevron, Credit Suisse First Boston, Nike, PeopleSoft and Texas Instruments, travel suppliers such as United Airlines, All Nippon Airways and National Airlines, and Internet-based content and electronic commerce providers and travel agencies such as Cendant, Travel.com and Trip.com. GetThere.com also recently entered into commercial relationships with American Express Travel Related Services and Northwest Airlines.

Hewlett-Packard Company -- a leading global provider of computing and imaging solutions and services for business and home -- is focused on capitalizing on the opportunities of the Internet and the proliferation of electronic services.

HP has 83,200 employees worldwide and had total revenue from continuing operations of $42.4 billion in its 1999 fiscal year. Information about HP, its products and the company's Year 2000 program can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com.

(1) HP-UX Release 10.20 and later and HP-UX Release 11.00 and later (in both 32- and 64-bit configurations) on all HP 9000 computers are Open Group UNIX 95 branded products.

(2) PA-RISC stands for Precision Architecture-reduced-instruction-set computing.