There's no doubt that eight-way servers provide a useful boost in computing power. The question is whether the increase is merely in line with standard advances, a sort of kissing cousin to Moore's Law--where not only does the chip speed double, but in this case, so does the number of chips--or something more significant. Critics point out that there are already faster chips making their way through Intel's pipeline, notably the 64-bit Itanium (formerly called Merced). They also say eight-way servers won't really reach their full potential until Microsoft ships Windows 2000 in the first quarter of next year, and industry-standard machines using 16 or more processors are already on the drawing board. Add to that the Y2K resource drain, which has virtually frozen many companies' IT budgets, and this would appear to be a very bad time to bring out a souped-up server.

Still, eight-way servers have the distinct advantage of actually existing, and even running Windows NT 4.0 they provide a big jump in processing power. Some analysts go so far as to say that the appearance of this new breed of eight-way servers will let companies rearchitect their IT infrastructures, moving large, vital applications to reliable, low-cost, standards-based servers.

"The term PC server just doesn't work anymore," says James Gruener, an analyst with the Aberdeen Group. "These devices have matured to the point where, with proper planning, they can become the centerpieces of an organization's IT architecture." But Gruener adds that this first generation of Profusion servers is not the proverbial silver bullet, but rather the first step in a process involving improvements to software and hardware that will ultimately let clusters of servers acquire strategic importance.

The major vendors of eight-way servers are unanimous in saying that early demand has surprised them. IBM points to several customers who have ordered dozens, and in one case hundreds, of its Netfinity 8500 eight-way servers. Compaq, the leading Wintel server vendor in the United States, says it will have 95% of the Intel eight-way market by year's end; it also says that some market projections for the devices will fall two to three times short of actual sales in 2000. Dell says that while some customers are ordering the devices with only four processors, most are requesting fully loaded boxes.

While some customers are taking delivery of one or two machines for tire-kicking purposes, others are plunging in and putting them to critical tests right away. Nordson Corp., a $660 million manufacturer of systems that apply adhesives, sealants, and coatings to consumer and industrial products, is making a major move to enterprise resource planning and will use a cluster of eight-way servers from HP to run SAP's R/3 system.

"The timing was right," says Kevin Beattie, director of corporate IS for the Westlake, Ohio, company. Nordson wanted to move away from an IBM mainframe as part of its adoption of ERP, saying that SAP R/3 running on Windows NT would provide the biggest bang for the buck, and it had already ordered some four-way servers from HP. The appearance of eight-way servers that could run NT 4.0 was fortuitous. So Nordson took delivery of 14 LXr 8500 eight-way servers from HP and is busily preparing to go into full production with its new ERP system in January.

The ability to upgrade from four-way to eight-way proved a major point in HP's favor. Even more important was the existence of beefy servers outside the Unix world. "The Unix alternative was much more expensive," Beattie says. "The price/performance of these Windows/Intel devices is a big advantage over Unix solutions."

That's not to say everything works in Nordon's favor. The company would ideally like to put the new servers into clusters of four, but it won't be able to do that until Windows 2000 ships next year. In the meantime, it can only put two of the machines together--the limit imposed by NT 4.0. And even though Windows 2000 is scheduled to ship in February, Nordson won't snap it up immediately. Instead, the company will wait for the green light from SAP. "An ERP investment is huge," Beattie says, "and until they certify R/3 in a Windows 2000 environment and optimize their product for it, we won't bring it in-house."

But if a fully optimized eight-way environment is a dream deferred, that doesn't seem to bother Beattie much. He says that once ERP is in full swing, Nordson will look to move Exchange and certain non-ERP database applications to eight-way servers as well. By the middle of next year, the company will have 1,200 employees using its ERP applications spread across a dozen eight-way machines.

Large database-intensive applications such as ERP are among the most likely uses for eight-way servers, usually in a clustered environment where they can be harnessed together as a sort of superserver. Another likely area is to support Internet applications, particularly E-commerce.

That's the case at Enron Corp., the Houston energy company, which is launching a new system devoted to trading natural gas and electricity online. "It's a bold initiative for us," says John Tollefson, Enron's senior director of infrastructure and integration. And the company, with $32 billion in 1998 revenue and an aggressive growth plan, is wasting no time. "We're migrating to these eight-way servers now," Tollefson says.

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