HP scales up server offerings

Despite a power outage that crippled much of San Francisco, Hewlett-Packard's new high-end server announcement proceeded with few difficulties. Unlike the power supply, the HP 9000 V2500 is a high-availability server with a 99.95% uptime guarantee.

The new server, powered by the HP-UX 11, is designed for large-scale decision support, data warehousing, enterprise resource planning and engineering applications. The V2500 is the first HP server to support 64 processors, and the company plans to scale to 128 processors by mid-1999.

The server is most appropriate for carriers with terabytes of data. HP's V2200, last year's enterprise offering, is in use at one of Bell Atlantic's data warehouses.

"Our need to analyze data will continue to grow, and as it does, we'll move to the V2500," said Jim Slawta, marketing systems director for Bell Atlantic. Bell Atlantic uses the V2200 for marketing and other ancillary business applications.

"Carriers that have several terabytes of data must have a core technology such as the HP 9000 V2500 that is scalable for future growth," said Thomas Wuerz, data warehousing program manager for HP's high-performance systems division.

HP's competitors include Sun Microsystems, IBM and NCR, which all have developed enterprise servers on the market. "It's an evolutionary announcement for HP, not revolutionary," said Dan Dolan, associate analyst of high-availability servers for Dataquest.