HP says Superdome tests sabotaged

Hewlett-Packard claims that a former employee damaged sales of its its high-end Superdome Server by sabotaging performance benchmark tests.

The company has taken out a lawsuit alleging that a former employee, Hock-Beng Lim, wrecked an online transaction benchmark test by reformatting disks, cutting computer cables and altering logs.

HP is seeking unspecified damages and is also trying to force Lim to give up any money he may have received from a competitor in order to undertake the sabotage.

The HP high-end Unix server was released in January. The company claimed at the time that the HP9000 Superdome outperformed competitor Sun's E10000 in the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPPC) benchmark test. The Superdome delivered over 190,000 transactions per minute, using 48 processors.

HP declined to say what performance improvements it would have expected had the tests not been sabotaged.