ProLiant 7000 Takes on Sun 450

Peter Lowber

With the excellent reputation Solaris has for supporting enterprise-class, mission-critical environments, and the scalability of Sun's Enterprise Server line, Sun's 450 is attractive for workgroup server and enterprise environments. But with its ProLiant (PL) 7000 , Compaq has developed a server that's strategically positioned against Sun's 450.

The PL 7000 provides many of the same Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) features as Sun's Enterprise 450 (see Datapro Report, previous page). In addition, the PL 7000 supports up to four of Intel's Pentium Pro 200-MHz, 1-MB, L2 cache processors.

But Compaq is positioning the PL 7000 with the future capability to support up to eight Intel processors. As eig ht-way servers for NT become a reality with NT 5.0 and Deschutes, the next-generation Intel server processor, the pressure will be back on Sun. The 450 is only a four-way server; for more scalability, Sun users are forced into a much-higher price bracket. Also, Compaq is strategically positioning the PL 7000 as a standards-based server for hot-plug PCI and I2O.

Now that Sun is supporting the PCI bus, Compaq is upping the ante. This is not an issue yet, but it may become one as these new standards materialize during 1998.

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ReLiable Expansion

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Compaq's ProLiant 7000 is expandable to eight CPUs.