Upgrade from K460 to K570/K580

[Tony Chiu]

Hi,

I've got a couple questions for the upgrade from K460 to K570/K580.

1. It seems to me that it takes a lot of steps for this upgrade, any ideas about the CPU capacity gain? I can just find the "Relative OLTP Performance" figures from the K-class spec which seems useful.

2. Is it a must to remove 4 HPPB slots and replace it by a HSC expansion slot? Can I keep the HPPB slots? Since I've got to use these 4 I/O expansion slots and cannot upgrade to 6 CPUs.

My systems are K460 (4 CPUs) running HP-UX 10.20 with 640MB RAM.

Thanks in advance.

[Patrick Wessel]

Tony,

There is no way to keep the 'old amount' of HP-PB slots. The system card (midplane) does not provide this slots any longer. You have to change to the faster HCS bus slots

[Brian M. Fisher]

Tony,

A K460 is rated at 5,000 - 16,500 TPM
A K570 is rated at 5,700 - 21,300 TPM
A K580 is rated at 6,600 - 25,000 TPM
Information provided by Abtech Systems:
http://www.abtechsys.com/products/systems/800_k_class.html

The K570 & K580 only support 2 HP-PB I/O slots
The K570 & K580 both can use 5 HP-HSC cards, 1 on system board & 4 with HSC expansion, and still have the ability to have (6) cpus.

Brian
<*(((>< er

[Dave Wherry]

Tony,
Last fall I was looking to upgrade a K570 to a K580. HP was having difficulty finding boards for the upgrade. Keep in mind that the K's are middle aged at best. Before dropping money into a K upgrade I would take a serious look at trading it in for an N class. Everything I've heard about them says those boxes are really nice. The maintenance on an N might be lower than your K costs.
Also, even though the trade-in value of a K isn't very high, the longer you hold on to it the lower the value goes.

[Wesley Busdiecker]

We looked at upgrades to some of our K series systems and while the upgrade to the K580 is a faily good jump, and certainly worth considering, it is small when compared to the what is possible in an L2000 or N4000 class. Additional the L class is fairly inexpensive and both the L and N class, particularly the N are very expandable when compared to the K class. You may find that like us the L2000 makes a better more expandable more powerful option than just upgrading your K460s to the K580. In fact it maybe possible that a L class may cost less than a K class upgrade, it is worth checking out with your supplier. Of course all bets are off if for some reason you can not go to an L or N, like your application does not run under HP-UX 11.0.

Performance measures (TPM):
L2000 with 360MHz 1CPU: 7613 4CPUs: 24200
L2000 with 440MHz 1CPU: 9714 4CPUs: 24724

N4000 basicly the same as above but up to 8 CPUs, so
N4000 with 360MHz 8CPUs: 43400
N4000 with 440MHz 8CPUs: 49300

Sorry but I have little data on the newer 550MHz CPU as far as performance is concerned. I can however guess based on some limited testing I have done and that it is about 15 to 18% faster than the 440MHz CPU in an 8-way N class we have. Not bad!

[Tony Chiu]

Thanks all of you.

BTW, where can I find the 'official' TPM-C figures from HP. As I can only find the figures for some of the HP models in www.tpc.org.

[Patrick Wessel]

Tony,

http://eproducts.hp.com
should be a one-stop-shoping for information. Select "Enterprise Computing' and choose the model you want information about.