After delivering its fastest HP 3000 months early this year, HP told customers they might enjoy a similar early delivery of the new N-Class PA-8500-based 3000s during the Year 2000.

The comments about upcoming shipments came in a futures-laden presentation at HP World, led by Platform Planning Manager Dave Snow of the Commercial Systems Division (CSY). Snow said that 10- and 12-way Series 997s would be available in the first quarter of next year, but CSY might have even faster systems ready within a half year or so of those 997 shipments.

“If we have an opportunity, we will try to pull [the N-Class] up to earlier than December [of 2000],” Snow said. “Don’t count on it any earlier than November.”

The timing of the two high-end system releases could be critical. While some customers need the heavy horsepower and expansion capability of those new top-end 997s as soon as they can get it, there’s a bonus for those who can wait about six months. N-Class buyers will get systems ready to accept IA-64 processors when those chips become available, while already performing at delivery far faster than any Series 997.

If HP’s performance projections hold up, customers evaluating a high-end system during 2000 could face waiting a few more months for a significantly faster HP 3000. The Series 997s can be installed by way of a box upgrade from other 99x systems. The N-Class units, because of new IO technology, will arrive only as new boxes.

As always, HP will be working on software enablers right up to delivery time of the new hardware. A new version of MPE/iX beyond 6.5 will be required for the N-Class systems, Snow said.

HP’s official plans are to have these N-Class servers ready by the end of 2000. But Snow pointed out that CSY delivered its latest system releases, based on the PA-8200 chip, in June — when the original promise was for the end of 1999. Those systems have been waiting on the release of Express 1 MPE/iX 6.0, which Snow promised would ship in the first week of September.

N-Class power

“It will be the fastest HP 3000 ever,” Snow said of the N-Class systems, outperforming both top-end Series 997s and 989/x50s. HP is predicting the N-Class will clock up to 65 HP 3000 Performance Units; the current top of the 3000 line rates at 41.5 for a 6-way Series 989/x50. Snow predicted the N-Class units would be “substantially more than 30 percent faster than the 12-way Series 997s.” Snow said HP would be replacing both of those systems with the N-Class 3000s in new sales opportunities.

“It’s exactly the same hardware that’s shipping today for the HP 9000 version,” Snow said of the coming 3000 N-class systems. “There won’t be any different core IO card.” HP is introducing PCI IO buses for the first time in 3000s with the N-Class, and aligning on a single IO bus across both 3000s and 9000s is expected to bring new system releases on those lines closer together.

“The limiter for our servers today is backplanes,” Snow said. “It has nothing to do with processors. We could put 8500 chips in 3000s today and they would run no faster.” Snow said that HP is integrating parallel backplane technology it acquired when the company purchased Convex. The new backplanes, which will be part of that N-Class 3000 release next year, have intelligence at either end, “so anytime you access a backplane the transaction is being multiplexed across somewhat slower backplanes, to give us very fast backplanes.”

The N-Class servers will use a 440MHz PA-8500 chip, be ready to accept 500 MHz PA-8600s and 700 MHz PA-8700s, and do up to 8-way multiprocessing. An add-on 1-gigabit LAN card will be available, and systems will ship with 12 multifunction PCI IO slots and two integrated hot-plug disk drives. The drives in this range can be a large as 72Gb per disk. HP is promising the N-Class will cost about what the midrange of the 9x9 systems cost today.

997 boosts memory, processor count

While customers are waiting for the benefits of the N-Class, those running high-end HP 3000s may be glad for those extra processors and the ability to run 16Gb of memory in a 997. That latter trick will require MPE/iX 6.5 and special memory carrier card. HP is providing 1Gb memory modules (A3832A) which plug into that carrier card.

The enhancement is enabling technology for even larger memory capacities in the HP 3000. That 6.5 version of MPE/iX will also permit the Series 979, 989 and 989/x50 to support up to 8Gb of memory. The version will also allow file sizes on the HP 3000 to rise to 128Gb, up from today’s limit of 4Gb.

Today’s 3000 memory subsystems cost up to $35 per megabyte, but the new 1Gb memory modules drive the cost down to $15 to $20 per Mb. The consolidation on the new carrier card also returns some slots for IO controllers and processors.

HP is only going to make the 10-way and 12-way configurations of the Series 997 available as upgrades from existing 997s. Customers who want to buy a 12-way system new will need to order an 8- to 10-way upgrade and a 10- to 12-way upgrade, and have HP install it.

“The 30 percent performance increase is going to be priced at a higher level than the traditional $20,000 per processor board,” Snow warned. “We haven’t picked the price point yet, but it will be higher.” The 30-percent performance increase only appears if a customer upgrades all the way, to a 12-way system, from an 8-way Series 997.

The 10- and 12-way 997s will require MPE/iX 6.5. “The limiter has been tuning changes in the operating system,” Snow said, improving dispatching of processes and managing of memory to resolve semaphore locking restrictions. HP will take orders early in 2000.

6.5 capacity improvements

Snow said HP is positioning the MPE/iX 6.5 release as the vehicle for the largest HP 3000 systems. The release will bring support for greater memory capacity as well as larger file sizes. Only HP 3000s running a PA-8000 or later processor will support the memory enhancements.

HP has engineered 6.5 with elbow room to support file sizes greater than 128Gb, but at the operating system’s release that will be the biggest file the 3000 will support. Other capacity improvements are terminal IO sessions (3300) and VT sessions (2600); increasing the maximum compatibility mode DSTs from 16,000 to 24,000; boosting TCP connections from 5,600 to 20,000; increasing the maximum UDP sockets to 10,000; and increasing the number of disk spindles supported from 255 to 511.

No FibreChannel for awhile

HP stuck to its plans to delay making FibreChannel available on the HP 3000, focusing its peripheral IO work on getting the PCI bus up and running on the N-Class servers. Last year Snow said that “our first introduction of FibreChannel will be on the next-generation platforms.” Now it would appear that the introduction of that peripheral bus might not be available at first release of the N-Class servers.

“FibreChannel has taken a second seat — not a total back seat — to allow us to get the N-Class [servers] out,” Snow said. In place of the FibreChannel support, HP was showing off an SCSI to FibreChannel bridge device, made by a third party and being certified for use with the HP 3000. HP was demonstrating the device in its booth attached to the new XP 256 RAID units and an HP 3000; it’s expected to be available in October.

“This won’t get you the speed, but it will get you the distance,” Snow said in his talk. “For most customers, the distance is more important than the speed.”

Low-end relief

Customers looking for a faster option on the 3000’s entry-level lineup will be waiting a while longer, but not as long as expected. Snow said a PA-8500-based low-end system will be ready by the middle of 2001, giving relief to the oldest part of HP’s active product line. These systems will be about 30 percent faster than the current 9x8 systems, by HP’s estimates, and Snow said they will ship about six months sooner than predicted last year.

“In two years we’ll have a new server at the bottom,” he said.

Classic compatibility with IA-64 systems

Snow said that it remains HP’s “goal to take all those Classic [16-bit] applications we carried forward into the PA-RISC world, and run those binaries in this [IA-64] world. There are a lot of customers out there who have old binaries that work perfectly well, and they don’t have the source. We haven’t seen an obstacle yet [to do this.]”

Weeding out the lineup

Snow also announced that board upgrades to the Series 969/x00 servers will be discontinued at the end of this year. HP already stopped selling Series 968 servers on July 1, since sales dropped off when customers started ordering Series 929s instead. HP also discontinued its board upgrades within the Series 996 server line in May. Series 996 customers who want upgrades will now have to move up to a Series 997 system.

The winnowing of the product line shows HP pushing its customers toward more recent PA-RISC processors. HP will be keeping the upgrade to the Series 988 for customers still working with the Series 9x8 chassis.

Snow also reiterated that the oldest of PA-RISC 3000s won’t be able to work with the 6.5 release of MPE/iX. The Series 925, 935, 949 (Firefox family), 920, 922, 932, 948, 958 (Silverfox family), 950, 955, 960 and 980 (Cheetah family) systems won’t work with that release. That’s because IO system rewrites to support those N-Class servers are so extensive that HP won’t be rewriting the older systems’ CIB-IO drivers to support MPE/iX 6.5.

The decision puts an end on support life for the oldest part of the 3000 PA-RISC line. HP won’t be supporting its 6.0 release of MPE/iX, the last to run on the older systems, beyond December, 2001. Snow noted that the supported lifespan of these earliest RISC HP 3000s was about 14 years. He also noted there is a possibility the end of support date for 6.0 might be extended. HP has noted the current end of support date for MPE/iX 5.5 is December of 2000.