InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

Due to debut at an event in New York, Compaq's new SMP server is designed to compete at the high end with Hewlett-Packard's 32-CPU V2600, IBM's 24-processor S80, and Sun Microsystems' 64-CPU Enterprise 10000. Analysts say it's a significant advance for the vendor: Compaq's current top-of-the-line system, the AlphaServer 8400 that came with its acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp., was the performance leader when it shipped five years ago. Now it's the oldest high-end Unix server in a fast-moving market.

Compaq wouldn't disclose details about Wildfire, but sources say it features 731-MHz Alpha processors and a new high-bandwidth switch architecture that eliminates the bottlenecks that can occur on typical bus-based systems. "Now Sun has three renewed competitors," says Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice, adding that Sun's 10000 now will be the elder statesman of the Unix set. It's been on the market for three years, vs. a few months for IBM's S80 and HP's V2600.

IBM unveiled a downsized version of its S80 system, which supports a high-speed switched architecture to enable it to perform better than systems with conventional bus architectures. The RS/6000 M80 shares the S80's high-speed switch design and supports up to eight 500-MHz, 64-bit PowerPC processors, 32 Gbytes of memory, and 56 PCI slots. Mike Maas, IBM's director of Web-server products, says he expects enterprise customers to use M80s as powerful application servers to surround their S80 database systems. It will ship in June, starting at $68,000.

John Schwartz, CEO at Xspeedium.com, a business-to-business marketplace for small and midsize companies in Bethesda, Md., plans to move up to the M80 soon. The dot-com needs the enhanced speed and capacity of the new server to keep up with its expanding requirements. Most of the Unix vendors "have great technology now," says Schwartz, "but no matter how fast we grow, we're not going to outgrow IBM."

IBM has also introduced the RS/6000 H80 and F80, each containing as many as six processors. While the systems are based on a bus architecture, they incorporate the high-speed copper wiring found in the S80 and M80 lines. "We're taking the copper-based high-end price performance we have with the S80 and bringing it to the midrange market," Maas says.