press release

HP Showcasing Itanium-based Superdome Server Running HP-UX, Windows and Linux Concurrently

Exhibit at Gartner Data Center Conference Demonstrates Power and Flexibility of Multi-OS Functionality

Today at the 21st Annual Gartner Data Center Conference, HP (NYSE:HPQ) is demonstrating an Itanium® 2-based HP Superdome server running multiple operating environments -- HP-UX, Windows® and Linux – concurrently within a single system in three separate partitions.

The demo highlights HP's ability to deliver multi-OS functionality on the industry-standard Itanium architecture to meet the diverse customer workload requirements typical of today's enterprise computing environments.

As businesses look to improve operational efficiencies and reduce costs, consolidating applications and workloads on their enterprise servers represents an effective means for increasing the return on their technology investments. By allowing multiple applications and operating systems to run in a partitioned environment, the highly available HP Superdome server gives customers the benefits of better manageability, scalability and flexibility.

This year's Gartner Data Center Conference is focused on helping customers do more with less and on IT consolidation. HP's adaptive infrastructure addresses both of these topics as illustrated by the Superdome demo as well as by additional demos of storage consolidation, a preview of new blades offerings and the industry- leading Utility Data Center.

HP's adaptive infrastructure enables enterprises to become more responsive to changing business conditions by creating a dynamic IT environment that fits with their evolving needs, reduces risk and complexity and delivers real-world return on their information technology investments.

Superdome Demo Description

The demo is being conducted with a 32-way HP Superdome system running HP-UX 11i, Windows and Linux operating environments concurrently in three different hardware partitions. The configuration of the server is as follows:

• Four-way partition running HP-UX 11i with the Oracle® 9.2 database and HP-UX Systems Administration Manger. (Note: HP-UX currently scales to 64 processors on current PA-RISC based systems)
• Twenty-way partition running an RC2 version of Microsoft® Windows .NET Server 2003 Datacenter Edition, a pre-release version of 64-bit Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Edition, and Windows System Resource Manager.
• Four-way partition running Linux with Linux desktop applications.

The system also is capable of running Oracle database server on Windows .NET Datacenter Server.

In a second scale-up demo that HP is hosting in conjunction with Microsoft, the Superdome server is configured with 32 processors running Windows .NET. When introduced later this year, the Itanium-based Superdome server will scale to 64-way computing and support 512 GB of memory for HP-UX and Windows .NET environments.

About HP

HP is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions and services to consumers and businesses. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. HP completed its merger transaction involving Compaq Computer Corporation on May 3, 2002. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group. Intel and Itanium are registered trademarks of Intel Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corp.