HP ANNOUNCES PORTFOLIO OF ITANIUM 2-BASED SYSTEMS, SOLUTIONS AND SERVICES.

HP (NYSE:HPQ) has announced the worldwide roll out of an extensive portfolio of Intel Itanium 2-based systems, integrated solutions and comprehensive services. With this launch, HP delivers the industry's broadest offering of Intel Itanium 2-based servers and workstations featuring breakthrough price and performance for HP-UX, Microsoft Windows and Linux environments.

"Our customers win today as HP's Itanium 2-based solutions deliver unmatched value," said Peter Blackmore, executive vice president, HP Enterprise Systems Group. "Customers get maximized business computing power with the benefits of breakthrough performance and scalability at a low cost. With HP's unparalleled expertise and comprehensive services, customers can quickly and seamlessly incorporate Itanium 2-based systems into their environments. In addition, with HP, the path for future growth is clear and customers' IT investments are protected."

"Our joint effort with HP has delivered an exceptional architecture and products that will deliver the scalability, reliability, investment protection and absolute performance for the most demanding enterprise needs," said Mike Fister, senior vice president and general manager, Intel Enterprise Platforms Group. "HP has developed a comprehensive portfolio of Itanium 2-based products complete with chipsets, a choice of operating systems, software and a broad family of server and workstation models that bolster Intel's efforts in this demanding market segment."

Nearly seven years of collaboration among industry leaders HP, Intel and Microsoft have led to an enterprise-ready Itanium 2-based ecosystem, underscoring the companies' long-standing commitment to the Itanium architecture.

"Microsoft consistently delivers affordable, scalable systems that reliably extend customers' server ecosystems and build on those investments," said Cliff Reeves, vice president, Windows division, Microsoft Corporation. "Working with HP and Intel, Microsoft is demonstrating that HP's Itanium 2-based systems running 64-bit Windows and SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) produce record-breaking performance. We will continue extending Windows' enterprise capabilities, thereby offering customers unsurpassed price/performance to tackle highly dynamic, complex workloads."

Enabled by the high-bandwidth, low-latency HP Chipset zx1, HP's new systems deliver record-breaking performance benchmarks that address customers' most complex and data-intensive workloads at better prices and performance than comparable RISC platforms.

HP's Itanium 2-based ecosystem also includes a wide array of integrated systems and services management solutions that allow customers to seamlessly monitor, deploy and provision systems and to enable service creation, assurance and usage for their customers. HP's portfolio also includes a suite of high-availability solutions to ensure data integrity and protect applications and environments against downtime.

HP's lifecycle services enable customers to quickly integrate the Itanium architecture into their IT infrastructure with rapid deployment, support and the peak performance of HP's Itanium 2-based systems. The new services include planning, porting and migration, implementation, support and education to provide a smooth transition to HP's Itanium 2-based systems.

HP customers such as Johns Hopkins University and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) said these offerings will strengthen their current and long-term investments in HP's Itanium 2-based systems as they work on issues requiring scalable, advanced computing power.

The Johns Hopkins University Sloan Digital Sky Survey project has been expanding its database catalog to about 300 million celestial objects. The positive effects of large memory support and increased processing power were seen very clearly in the first generation Windows Advanced Server, Limited Edition Itanium-based server, according to the university.

"With HP's Itanium-based systems running Windows, configured with 28 GB of memory, we were able to perform calculations in 10 days that previously would have taken half a year. During testing, the 64-bit Itanium-based server processed data at 350 MB per second, which was astounding," said Alex Szalay, Alumni Centennial Professor, Johns Hopkins University. "Johns Hopkins is looking forward to even more amazing performance from the Itanium 2-based systems from HP running on Windows. We're considering porting our entire database to these next-generation servers."

"Using the Itanium architecture, HP's engineers worked closely with PNNL to apply computational science to key scientific challenges," said David Dixon, associate director for theory, modeling and simulation at the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy scientific user facility at PNNL. "With the advanced processing power and peak performance delivered by the Itanium 2 processor and HP's world-class services and support, PNNL will have one of the fastest and most powerful supercomputers in the world to address increasingly complex biological and environmental problems."

The HP and Intel Solution Centers located in Grenoble, France, and Cupertino, Calif., provide customers access to HP and Intel expertise and now offer a broad range of Itanium 2-based systems and a complete Internet data center environment to facilitate easy integration into their existing architectures.

In addition, HP and Intel are creating Itanium 2-based development reference platforms, consisting of HP's Itanium 2-based servers and software development tools for ISVs developing HP-UX, Windows and Linux applications. The expanded solution centers and reference platform give customers the immediate benefit of high-quality Itanium-based solutions that can be quickly implemented.