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HP points new midrange box at low end, Year 2000

Revived 939 offers best entry point for upgrades to 9x9 systems

Seeing a hole it had created in its HP 3000 product lineup, HP has revived a low end system in its Series 9x9 family, targeting the new box for upgrading customers and companies working to solve Year 2000 problems.

HP claimed in late 1996 that its Series 939 systems were being eliminated from the product line because of declining demand. Less than a year later the 939 is back, in the return of an HP 3000 that observers have called the best hardware deal in the entire HP 3000 lineup.

HP’s Commercial Systems Division (CSY) dropped the box – that one wag called “a deal too good to keep on the price list” – last fall. The new Series 939KS/020 systems surface with a “fat cache” added, giving an 18 percent performance boost to a box that was already the best deal for a single-processor HP 3000. The system uses a 78 MHz PA-7200 chip with a full megabyte of both instruction and data caches – geek speak for a box that now runs almost as fast as the bottom of the Series 969 systems.

Pricing on the new low-end of the 9x9 line is designed to get attention from customers who have been delaying an upgrade from 9x7 or 9x8 systems. Some resellers say the 939 was always popular with customers, even at its old price/performance mark.



		HP admitted during its product announcement of the new 939 that the 9x9 family had too steep an entry price point without the new low-end system

“The 939 is the perfect place to move the 9x7 customers,” said Duane Percox, a principal at HP 3000 reseller Quintessential School Systems. “It was the best value over the whole product line.”

Percox said the new system will be attractive to his customers running Series 9x7 systems “and wanting to upgrade – the 9x8s don’t offer enough flexibility, but the 9x9s do.” HP admitted during its product announcement of the new 939 that the 9x9 family had too steep an entry price point without the new low-end system. For the last year or more entry into the 9x9 line has been at the 969 level, a place that CSY’s Kriss Rant admitted was “too giant a step for them.” At the same time, the alternative 9x8 systems won’t work with Fibre Channel connections and are only outfitted for HP-IB peripherals, making them a questionable upgrade path for 9x7 customers. 9x9 systems use SCSI peripherals, offering faster access times, lower pricing and better data transfer rates.

HP has quoted a price of $12,000 for the CPU part of the new system, which ships fully outfitted and ready to crank on IMAGE/SQL databases for a bottom line of $76,139. That includes 128Mb of memory – twice what the old 939s shipped with – as well as a 20-user MPE/iX license, a 4-Gb drive, 4-8 Gb DAT tape, and an HP PowerTrust UPS and console. It’s shipping today, and needs either the MPE/iX 5.0 with PowerPatch 6 or 5.5 Express 3 releases.

HP wants to position the new 939 as a solution to Year 2000 problems, in part because of its affordability. It’s hoping customers will choose to replicate their current operations on a 939 they’ll lease from HP in a new deal called the Cure2000 Testing Bundle. This configuration, expected to ship sometime early next year, brings in a 939 already loaded with all of HP’s software, as well as key third-party tools, to let customers convert applications and systems for the Year 2000. Already announced for the bundle are tools from SolutionSoft, Allegro Consultants and Cognos. Pricing on the lease is expected to be announced in January or February, according to HP CSY manager Dianne Carter.

But the 939 may also be the vehicle for a push on HP’s part to get its systems into new customer sites, because it’s “not a stripped-down version of the 9x9 line,” according to CSY’s Daren Connor. It ships with four slots and can accept up to eight in its chassis.Customers will need to wait for MPE/iX 5.5 Express 5, due in February, to use an external-chassis I/O expander hardware that HP plans to ship early next year for the 9x9 line. With the expander the new 939 can support as many as 36 slots, to let the system provide storage capacity up to 4 terabytes using RAID configurations. The system accepts up to 36Gb of integrated disk drive storage at release and supports up to 250 users.

The box also has investment protection in its ability to morph into the faster systems in the 9x9 line via upgrades, right up to the 64-bit PA-8000 chips in the 979 systems. Configured as a 939, the system doesn’t support morethan one processor, but allows customers to field-upgrade upgrade the box to the multiprocessor 969s or 979s.

This scalability can be important to companies which are replacing older systems from other suppliers and need assurance that a low initial cost won’t make business growth an expensive proposition. The range of the 9x9 line through field upgrades means customers can get five times the performance when going from the new single processor 939 to a four-processor 979. Any trade-ins through the rest of December qualify for HP’s TradeUp 97 discounts, which can even be extended to non-HP systems.

Now that it’s been reborn, the 939KS/020 is a also big improvement over the 9x7 and 9x2 systems HP hopes it will replace. According to HP’s relative performance charts, the Series 939KS/020, because of its extended cache, is only a little less than 20 percent slower than the Series 969/100 systems. HP has said the first upgrade from the 939 that makes any sense is the 969/120, another “fat cache” system running a faster model of the PA-7200 processor.