Intel® Itanium® 2-Based HP Integrity Servers Help CompUSA Ramp Inventory Tracking In Time For Holiday Season

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 18, 2003 - CompUSA, one of the nation's leading computer retailer, has deployed HP Integrity servers powered by Intel® Itanium® 2 processors to speed access to time-sensitive inventory data by as much as 85 percent. The solution will help CompUSA adapt to changing business needs, particularly during the busy holiday season.

The upgrade from a 32-bit server environment enables the company to be more agile in responding to spikes in demand for its computer products, an important competitive differentiator as the holiday buying season approaches. The processing power of the HP Integrity servers powered by Itanium 2 processors also allow CompUSA to run more programs on less hardware, and support double or triple the number of users. This will enable CompUSA to reduce costs associated with maintaining its data center.

"CompUSA's vision is to be able to scale our data warehouse to support our ongoing growth," said Cathy Witt, chief information officer, CompUSA. "The Itanium 2 microarchitecture allows us to get there - to scale up to 8-way, 16-way and in the future to 32- and 64-way servers. As a result of the Itanium 2 processor-based HP Integrity server solution, we have seen tremendous performance improvement on several processes associated with our data warehouse."

The company has deployed Itanium 2 processor-based HP Integrity rx5670 and HP Integrity rx2600 solutions running SAP* enterprise resource planning software and Microsoft* SQL Server on the Microsoft Windows* Server 2003 operating system. The solution enables employees at CompUSA's 227 stores to analyze purchasing trend data. CompUSA chose to test their solution in the HP Solution Center, a secure datacenter resource for customers to perform proof of concept and benchmark work with access to highly skilled HP engineers.

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