News

Compaq to Demo 8-Way Xeon Servers

• By Scott Bekker
• March 11, 1999

Compaq claims these systems will prove that Windows NT can scale beyond four processors. "We got nearly linear scalability with TPC benchmarks, which is considerably better than PII scalability," says Tim Golden, director, enterprise server product marketing, Compaq. "The best that our four-way Xeon systems got was about 22,000 tpmC’s, but 8-ways got in excess of 37,000 tpmC’s."

Compaq also claims that at the show it will run benchmarks on SAP, Oracle8 and a series of other applications, all of which will demonstrate Windows NT’s scalability.

"Microsoft has been further ahead in scalability and clustering than most people thought," says Laura Didio, senior analyst with Giga Information Group (www.gigaweb.com), a market research firm.

In addition to beefing up the power of Windows NT, Compaq’s Golden says these machines are now ready for the realm of Unix and NetWare operating systems, and the company will be shipping them preinstalled as well as Windows NT.

"We are locked and loaded with all of our major partners: SCO, Linux and Novell," he says.

Compaq, and another hardware vendor wishing to remain anonymous, expects 8-way Xeon-based servers to ship sometime in June.

"The real beauty of these 8-ways is that we plan to release them at nearly the same price point as our 4-ways of today," says Golden. – Thomas Sullivan, Senior Reporter/Northwest Correspondent