HP to upgrade its servers

Hewlett-Packard India said that it will upgrade its low-to- mid range Itanium chip-based servers from 32 bit architecture to 64 bit.

HP said, it was seeing a shift from 32 bit and hence over the next three months it will refurbish the server range in India.

The move follows a $16.2 million mid-range server sales in the second quarter, up 45 per cent over the same period last year.

According to IDC's Q2 figures HP had a clear dominance in the mid-range server market in India in units shipped and revenues.

The company also claimed that it was the only vendor to post positive growth in this segment during the second quarter.

Hemant Tiwari, director "" enterprise server and storage (customer solutions group) HP India, said, "Our showing in Q2 was on account of strong growth in the telecom, oil, finance & high performance technical computing segments. HP's AlphaServer ES45 continued to be a bestseller in the telecom market segment with OpenCall software,"

Pallab Talukdar, director (marketing and alliances "" enterprise and public sector) quoting IDC estimates said the total server market in India stood at $114.1 million, marking a 27 per cent growth over the corresponding period last year and up 6 per cent sequentially. He claimed "" Unix, Windows and Linux "" witnessed positive growth.

However, he added, India was bucking the world trend by adopting Linux cautiously. Unix is still the preferred choice, he added. In fact, according to the IDC server report, India was the fastest growing non-X86 Unix market in Asia.

HP said its Unix family of servers continued to gain acceptance in the server marketplace with several customer wins including the likes of ONGC, Bharat Petroleum, TVS Motors, BSNL and Bank of India.

Besides HP said, it's servers had earned performance benchmarks on core banking solutions from Infosys's product Finacle, I-flex's Flexcube and LHS's telecom billing application.

For instance, the company said, Finacle powered by HP's integrity superdrome server delivered over 8 million transactions per day with 7000 online users and over 20M customers

HP shipped 232 units of mid-range servers in Q2 2004 (April-June), which accounted for growth of 75.8 per cent year on year when compared to Q2, 2003. HP's Integrity server line saw revenues increase by 50 per cent in Q2 2004 versus Q1 2004.