Hewlett-Packard (HP) Ireland has secured a contract to supply American Power Conversions (APC) with the first Superdome system to be installed in Ireland.
US-based APC, a global provider of power systems, will implement the Superdome at its Galway-based operation where it will provide a disaster recovery service for its production facility in the US.
The contract involves the design and installation of the server and includes a three-year support services contract. The HP Superdome comes with the latest PA-RISC processor, the PA 8700, 875MHz and 16GB of memory. The Superdome can, however, be configured into 16 hardware partitions, scalable from 1 to 64 central processing units (CPUs) and has a storage capability of up to 256MB of memory.
“We wanted to be able to replicate the environment we have in our production facility in the US, which consists of two HP servers,” commented Pascal O’Neill, information systems director at APCs’ Enterprise Data Centre in Galway. “The HP UX 11i operating system that the Superdome offers provides a partitioning capability that allows us to do that.”
O’Neill added: “We are already a HP customer, both in the US and in Ireland, and we wanted to continue that relationship. HP also provided value for money as we wanted to have a disaster recovery solution in place, but we also had to consider issues of total cost of ownership.”
Launched in September 2000 amid great fanfare, the Unix-based Superdome is HP’s most powerful server and is designed for high-end ‘mission critical’ applications such as supply chain, billing, CRM (customer relationship management) and systems consolidation. In 2002, the HP Superdome was voted as the No 1 Unix server by analyst Gartner.
By Brian Skelly
Pictured: Pascal O’Neill, IS director at American Power Conversions in Galway
