As part of its concerted drive to bring the benefits of the Compaq merger to companies across southern Africa, HP is delivering its latest range of high-end AlphaServer systems via authorised channel partners throughout the region.
That`s the word from Gaf Khan, the business critical server manager for southern Africa at HP, who believes the systems will continue to power business applications at all kinds of companies around the region.
"We have three server systems in the new range, all of which are based on our latest EV7 Alpha processors. They deliver significantly enhanced performance, scalability, reliability, manageability and high availability. And they continue to provide compatibility with the systems that our customers may have already invested in," he says.
Responding to some international observations that Alpha is no longer a key part of the HP solution portfolio, Khan is keen to reaffirm the company`s commitment to the product line.
"It`s a total misconception that our focus on Alpha has slipped since the merger," he says.
"Many of our existing customers in the southern African telco, financial services and other vertical markets rely on Alpha-based systems to keep their core business applications up and running.
"With that in mind, we`ve introduced our HP Alpha RetainTrust programme - an initiative for customers and partners that ensures Alpha systems and applications are supported for years to come. While long-term plans are in place to enable customers to migrate to systems based on the [HP- and Intel-developed] Itanium processor architecture, AlphaServers remain a critical part of our solution set."
The new AlphaServers serve a similar purpose to their predecessors - they are mainstay of many large companies that needed mainframe-level power and availability, notes Khan. "They still feature prominently in the data centres and server farms of large corporates, offering massive processing power, high availability and data protection."
The line up includes the high-end GS1280 enterprise server, the ES80 departmental server and the ES47 workgroup systems. All run the tried-and-tested Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS operating systems, and open source Linux is available on the latter two systems.
As HP`s most powerful AlphaServer to date, the GS1280 is shipping today in a 16-processor model; one which can run up to 64 Alpha processors will be available towards the end of the year. It`s designed to provide a high-end platform for telecommunications, business intelligence, business applications, high performance technical computing and server consolidation.
The ES47 features up to four EV7 Alpha processors is an ideal workgroup platform for dedicated application servers, infrastructure servers such as Web, proxy and mail servers, telecommunications and high-performance technical computing applications.
The ES80 is powered by up to eight EV7 processors and is ideal for building a departmental-level environment, especially when flat-out application and database performance is demanded.
"We`ve done a great deal of work to make the new Alpha EV7 processor capable of improving application performance," explains Khan.
"The chip itself contains all the building blocks of `symmetric-multiprocessing`, which means it can inherently enhance performance, scalability and reliability directly at chip level. These chips are also connected directly to each other, which also delivers a lot more power - generally an improvement of between 30% and 100%."
Further information on the new AlphaServer systems can be accessed at: www.hp.com/go/ev7systems. For more information on HP`s solutions and activities in Africa, surf to www.hp.com/africa.
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