HP Launches E-Business Products And Services

Hewlett-Packard, taking aim at the growing business-to-business E-commerce market, today unveiled a series of E-business products and services. Saying it understands the unique requirements of an infrastructure that can support E-business, HP says it is ready to supply the technology and services to fulfill them.

With the help of partners, HP will provide soup-to-nuts services, from business planning to systems implementation. On the product side, the company this week will begin shipping its V2600 server, which comes with as many as 32 PA RISC 8600 processors operating at 550 MHz, making the server 20% more powerful than its predecessor. Pricing will start at $240,000. The V2600 servers will arrive with new features for HP-UX 11 that include Workload Manager, which lets systems managers prioritize system resources based on the application's importance. HP will also ship the Fibre Channel HyperFabric 2000 switch, which will let IS administrators connect as many as 128 servers into a single system view, using HP's Scalable Computing Architecture.

Les Wilson, HP's mission-critical systems manager, says customers building infrastructures to support E-business require on-demand capacity increases, security, ease of management and administration, and global access from devices ranging from cell phones to desktops. "Demand for bandwidth, front-end servers, and storage is exploding," he says. "Computing for the Internet economy is exciting, though chaotic."