Enhanced HP 9000 N-Class at BT

Palo Alto 25 Feb 00 Hewlett-Packard Company enhanced the HP 9000 N-Class Enterprise Server.The heart of the midrange N-Class server is the 64-bit PA-8600 processor, running at speeds up to 550MHz. Also contributing to the overall 25 percent performance improvement is a the 100 percent increase in memory capacity to 32GB, enhanced connectivity and an increase in aggregate I/O bandwidth to 6.4 Gb/s. The system's secure, remote-management capabilities make the N-Class a robust platform for Internet applications. Global telecommunications giant British Telecom (BT) is using the N-Class in its billing department to verify call records at a rate of nearly 350,000 records per minute.

"The success of the N-Class shows the level of confidence that service providers, dot coms and enterprise customers have in the HP 9000 server family," said Patrick Rogers, worldwide marketing manager for HP's Business Critical Computing Business Unit. "Our customers are purchasing the N-Class because it offers outstanding price/performance and a product roadmap for midrange computing that sets it apart from the crowd. Not only have we implemented CPU, memory and I/O improvements that accelerate processing times, but HP's iCOD [instant capacity on demand] technology makes additional computing resources available as necessary to ensure adequate horsepower to handle unpredictable traffic loads."

The N-Class offers a significant price/performance benefit over its competitors because its powerful and efficient processors provide more speed while using fewer processors than competitive products. The N-Class delivers scalability, without tradeoffs, at a much lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than competitors' products. The N-Class server's best-in-class in-chassis growth path also eliminates the need for migration when workload increases or when next-generation processors become available.

Global telecommunications giant British Telecom (BT) is using the N-Class in its billing department to verify call records at a rate of nearly 350,000 records per minute. By tripling the capacity of the previous server platform, BT is now able to process half a billion call records daily. BT has expressed complete satisfaction with its entire N-Class experience.

"I rang HP on a Monday to request an N-Class server," said Prajay Shah, a senior technical architect at British Telecom. "By Thursday of the same week, it had been built and delivered to our Ipswich, UK, site. On Friday, with assistance from HP, our [record-processing] application was moved onto the new server and, by the end of the weekend, the backlog of call records was eliminated. The cooperation we received from HP was unbelievable."

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