Bringing the mainframe experience to the open systems world Hewlett Packard hypes its new Superdome HP 9000 in NYC. Protein say, relax.On 12/08/00 Hewlett Packard introduced its latest high-end Unix server, the  Superdome HP 9000, boasting 64 processors [expandable eventually up to 128 processors], 256 Gigabytes of memory, running PA RISC processors [but Intel Itanium ready by 2002] and a multi-op systems’ architecture that supports HP-UX I, later HP-UX, Windows NT and Linux.Duane Spanky Zitner, HP President of Computing Systems, overcome by the emotion of it all, stated:“This is the fastest, most reliable and scaleable Unix server in the world. This is the mother of all computers. It is one damn spank server.” Like far out, man. We at protein say: “But Spanky, it’s not the fastest, we don’t know if it’s the most reliable until we have seen it working, and yes it is scaleable but so is Lego.“With IBM, Compaq, SGI, NEC and Unisys all playing the field, the Unix server market boasts big profits and the  Superdome HP 9000 is intended to go directly head 2 head against Sun Microsystems’ 64 processor E1000 Starfire and IBM’s S8 servers.By their own admission “14 months ago HP was getting killed in dot com space.” With the Superdome, the company hopes to set the Unix server standard.Most of the package’s benefits appear to be service and human resource related: single members of HP accountable directly to single clients and for single machines; pay as you go [or capacity on demand]; partitioning methods; but with a starting price of $1 million for 256 GB of memory [about the same storage as a classroom of i-Macs] HP are lucky to be able to use their existing customer base to get this off the ground.With Sun bringing in nu servers in 2001 and still committed to a single chip future [and this ensuring a co-evolving os] and Compaq’s current symmetric multi-threading machines, not to mention IBM’s multiple-on chip processing system, the verdict is still open on whether Motherdome will make the money.