Chapter 1. A 5-minute overview With this sales guide, you will read about new systems, applications, and products that will help you sell more HP 3000s this year. Grow installed base business The new Series 977, 980/300 and 980/400 give you increased opportunities to upgrade HP 3000 systems requiring additional performance boosts. Additional open systems functionality such as the POSIX Developer Kit and NFS make it easy to port and develop state-of-the-art applications to the 3000. Improved mainframe alternative The addition of the Series 980/300 and 980/400, support of disk arrays, and stronger mainframe interoperability increase your opportunities to sell in mainframe downsizing deals. Walk with confidence into deals requiring superior high-end offerings. More solution sales The HP 3000 open systems strategy continues to pay dividends in the form of additional new VAB recruits. Three new VABs come from the UNIX environment offering you more opportunities to sell into new accounts. (Figure 1.1) Open HP 3000 delivers what customers want Several forces are helping you be more successful in selling HP 3000 systems this year. The first is a clear shift among your customers in the definition of open systems. Customers are not necessarily seeking UNIX, but want to access multiple vendor systems and have portability of solutions. The HP 3000 is well positioned to meet these needs. Using open to help close deals Today, we are introducing products to strengthen the HP 3000 interoperability and portability. For example, POSIX provides UNIX portability and ensures more new application starts adding to wins such as General Mills and Scott Paper. Access to IBM environments help mainframe downsizing wins such as Foxboro. And better workstation integration with NFS will help close deals such as Silicon Graphics. Read more about these success stories in Chapter 5. MPE renamed! MPE/XL has been renamed MPE/iX to reflect standards such as POSIX which complement the rich commercial functionality of MPE. MPE/iX offers improved application portability to help recruit more VABs and bring more solutions to your customers. Services for fast start to open HP 3000 New VAB services such as factory technical consulting, electronic bulletin board access, and special training are now available. Today, we are introducing several new VAB solutions which lend additional credibility to the open HP 3000 offering. The HP Open Software Environment (OSE) provides your customer and VABs a roadmap to open systems through consulting and design guides. The HP 3000 is a key part of the OSE portfolio of services. (Figure 1.2) New 977 extends the midrange In July of this year, 10 new systems were introduced that set the standard for midrange power and price/performance. Today's introduction of the Series 977 extends the midrange with 25-30% more power than the 967, while providing industry-leading cost of ownership. 9x7 platform enhancements In addition to the 977 platform, several enhancements to the 9x7 systems are also being announced: o with the availability of a new 32 Mbyte memory card in February, maximum memory supported on the Series 937, 947, 957, 967, and 977 will be 384 Mbytes. o a new integrated DDS tape drive shipping in January will expand backup storage capacity by 50% using a new 90 meter cassette tape o the 937LX and 937 now have a 40 user license shipping immediately o in December, an optional floating point co-processor will be shipping on 937LX, 937, 947LX, and 947 in addition to the other systems where the co-processor has been an option (Figure 1.3) Series 980 3-way and 4-way multiprocessing capabilities The powershift continues with HP's multiprocessing capabilities. The Series 980/300 extends the high-end performance range by over 30% and compares to the horsepower up to 20 Series 70 systems. The Series 980/400 extends the range an additional 30% and offers an 8x performance multiplier across the Series 950 platform. Series 980 competitive pricing The Series 980 systems are leaders in mainframe-class price/performance, delivering power comparable to the IBM ES/9000 and DEC VAX 9000 mainframes at a fraction of the cost. Series 980/100 and 980/200 prices, are also competitively priced against DEC VAX 6000 systems. Mainframe-class disks The new HP-FL disk array products strengthen HP's positioning of the HP 3000 as a mainframe alternative. With these large capacity disks, the HP 3000 high-end systems can now support over 300 Gbytes of data. The high availability disk products allow both very large HP 3000 configurations and a high level of system availability. (Figure 1.4)