HP's Marvel AlphaServers ready to roll

ONE OF OUR SOURCES in Compaq Germany which the firm hasn't manage to eradicate, weed out or muzzle, has provided us with mucho information about next week's launch of the "Marvel" EV7 products.

According to her, HP will announce a deal with a big US car rental firm who will go for the new products.

Those, she said, are likely to include the high end GS1280 server for enterprises, the ES80 for departmental use and the ES47, aimed at smaller workgroups.

32-way GS 1280s will be released in the midle of the year, and 64-way GS 1280s by the end of 2003.

The ES80s can support eight 1GHz Alphas, while the ES47 will support two and four way 1GHz Alphas.

HP has already quietly shipped 16-processor GS1280 and is ready to launch 64-way Alpha systems later in the year.

The firm won't release EV79 technology until next year and is positioning these Alphas as a kind of half way house to future Itanium systems HP will release.

HP will do that by introducing a cunning plan called Alpha Retain Trust.

The servers, as long expected, will use switchless mesh architecture, that means the Alpha chips can be directly connected to each other, and also will be bundled with software and other hardware announcements.

Meanwhile, TruCluster server software and Tru64 Unix V5.1B are also expected to be formally announced, while OpenVMS has been tweaked to take advantage of the better functionality in the Alpha architecture. Binary compatibility, too.

Benchmarks seen by our German molette indicate that the Stream mark gives up to 10 times better bandwidth than Big Blue or Sun systems.

These boxes ain't cheap. For eample, the GS1280 with eight 1.15GHz Alphas cost nearly $120,000. The ES80s probably cost around $75,000 or so, while the ES47 two way systems start off at around $42,000 or so. µ

* THE INQUIRER "by Mike McGee is an outrageous collection of articles about the HP Compaq merger, the fuure of Alpha, the prospects of Intel and whatever else takes his fancy. It is rough around the edges but well worth a look". Thanks, guys, we think.

See Also
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Intel takes Alpha from Compaq's hands