News release

HP Begins Shipment of Its Most Powerful AlphaServer — the 64-processor GS1280 System

New entry-level AlphaServer system, enhancements to Tru64 UNIX and OpenVMS operating systems also announced

Marking another milestone on its roadmap for AlphaServer customers, HP has begun shipment of its most powerful AlphaServer system yet — the 64-processor HP AlphaServer GS1280. The company also introduced a new entry-level system — the single-processor HP AlphaServer DS15.

The new products, part of the company's AlphaServer RetainTrust program, are designed to meet the computing needs of AlphaServer customers while ensuring a smooth transition to Itanium® architecture-based HP Integrity servers on their own timetable.

The 64-processor AlphaServer GS1280 system completes the rollout, started in January, of the new family of AlphaServer systems based on the EV7 Alpha processor. The EV7-based AlphaServer family delivers outstanding performance, scalability, reliability, manageability and high availability for HP OpenVMS and Tru64 UNIX® customers. The new single-processor AlphaServer DS15 system offers an up-to-date replacement for the entry-level AlphaServer DS10 system, providing more performance and reliability for the same low price in the same physical dimensions.

"The 64-processor GS1280, the most powerful AlphaServer system we've ever delivered, gives customers the performance they need today while they plan for the transition to Itanium processor-based HP Integrity servers over time," said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager, Business Critical Servers, HP. "Today's announcement is another stepping stone along the road toward our strategy of creating innovative products and solutions that provide HP's customers with the lowest total cost of ownership, better choice and flexibility, and assured stability and security where it matters most in their business."

Along with the availability of the new GS1280 and DS15 systems, HP has enhanced the entire EV7-based AlphaServer family with:

• Double the memory capacity — now up to eight gigabytes per central processing unit (up to 512 GB on the GS1280 M64).

• A new, optional, high-performance input/output drawer that quadruples the I/O capacity in the same rack space as the current, standard I/O drawer.

• A new memory channel interconnect adapter that dramatically lowers the cost to connect systems in clusters.

OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX enhancements

HP also enhanced OpenVMS functionality for the AlphaServer EV7 family with Version 7.3-2. This version includes higher levels of system availability, increased I/O and symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) performance, improved security, UNIX portability and systems management features, along with enhanced storage area network offerings. In addition, HP is offering AlphaServer EV7 system support for OpenVMS Galaxy soft partitions with dynamic system resource reallocation capabilities for OpenVMS.

In addition, the company now offers greater functionality with Tru64 UNIX V5.1B-1, which provides AlphaServer customers with improved scalability and performance enhancements, including refined and virtual memory management with application-tunable big pages and expanded storage capabilities. Applications running on Version 5 of Tru64 UNIX will run on Version 5.1B-1 without modification.

"Our customers' businesses are growing more complex, requiring greater system and application performance. The long-standing relationship between Oracle and HP has an excellent history or providing solutions that excel in these areas," said Mark Milani, vice president, Product Engineering, Oracle Corporation. "Oracle customers who choose HP EV7-based AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX V5.1B and its updates will continue to get the benefits of Oracle Database and Oracle Applications on HP."

Enthusiastic AlphaServer customer reaction

Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, a provider of leading-edge computational resources, chose HP AlphaServer systems to help with diverse scientific and complex research challenges of its users.

"We have already invested in the new HP AlphaServer GS1280 systems running Tru64 UNIX to handle the high-speed processing required for some of our most demanding research in biology, medicine and environmental sciences," said Drs. Michael Levine and Ralph Roskies, co-scientific directors, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. "Now that HP has released support for 64-way systems, we expect to have four GS1280 M64 systems up and running within a day of receiving the upgrade."

Aurora Healthcare, a not-for-profit health care system based in Wisconsin, chose HP AlphaServer systems running OpenVMS to create an infrastructure that would enable the organization to stay ahead of capacity demands.

"The solution to our capacity challenge was an AlphaServer GS1280 system. On the first day of production, it averaged 16 percent utilization. During prime time utilization, it has not exceeded 25 percent," said Lee Ottinger, manager of technical services, Aurora Healthcare. "So with this single system, we have gone from 90 percent utilization to 25 percent utilization. Now our users are happy, and we can sleep at night."

Malta Freeport, the leading transshipment hub in the Mediterranean, chose HP AlphaServer systems running Tru64 UNIX to ensure its critical systems would remain operational 24 hours a day.

"The HP system implemented has significantly increased the company's processing capability and it is enabling Malta Freeport to reach new heights in operational performance," said Captain Rado Antolovic, senior operations manager, Malta Freeport. "The new system is providing Malta Freeport and its clients with accurate real-time information of all container movements round-the-clock whilst guaranteeing security of the information flow."

Cerner Corporation, a healthcare provider headquartered in Kansas City, Mo., chose HP AlphaServer systems running OpenVMS v7.3-1 to ensure high availability of its critical healthcare applications.

"At its root, you need a solid, dependable, high-performance system. It doesn't do you any good to have the right answer two minutes after you needed it," said Rod Coombs, vice president product management, Cerner Corporation. "We settled on OpenVMS because of its significant fault tolerant capabilities. Clearly an outage in a healthcare system is extremely critical. OpenVMS on AlphaServer systems allows us to measure outages in milliseconds rather than minutes, something few other operating system allows us to do."

ABB Inc., a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact, has chosen HP AlphaServer DS15 systems.

"ABB Network Management intends to purchase between 75 and 150 new HP AlphaServer DS15 systems for use in ABB's Network Manager solutions that will be provided to the electric utility industry in the coming year," said Ron Smith, manager of hardware and production, ABB. "The DS15 servers offer a significant increase in performance, price/performance and functionality over HP's current DS10 systems, yet are delivered in a compact package occupying the same physical space."

Enhanced Alpha RetainTrust program

The HP Alpha RetainTrust program is designed to provide long-term business continuity for AlphaServer customers. The program eases the evolution of moving from the Alpha platform to Itanium architecture-based HP systems by providing comprehensive customer initiatives, strong independent software vendor support, leading products, extensive service offerings and compelling business practices.

The business practices component of the program has been enhanced with a new hardware and software storage upgrade program. Additionally, as an enhancement to the services component of the program, HP plans to release an update to its application transition tools to assist with the transition of Tru64 UNIX custom code to HP-UX 11i Version 2 at the end of the year.

Additional information on the new AlphaServer systems is available at www.hp.com/go/new-alpha-systems.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing for consumers, enterprises and small and medium businesses. For the last four quarters, HP revenue totaled $71.3 billion. More information about HP is available at http://www.hp.com.

Itanium is a registered trademark of Intel Corp. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries. UNIX is a registered trademark of the Open Group.

This news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties and assumptions. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements. Risks, uncertainties and assumptions include the possibility that the market for the sale of certain products and services may not develop as expected; that development and performance of these products and services may not proceed as planned; and other risks that are described from time to time in HP's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the period ended July 31, 2003 and HP's other Securities and Exchange Commission reports filed after HP's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 31, 2002. If any of these risks or uncertainties materializes or any of these assumptions proves incorrect, HP's results could differ materially from HP's expectations in these statements. HP assumes no obligation and does not intend to update these forward-looking statements.