HP server sings after spy turned canary

Cloak and dagger era ends and server comes into its own...

The performance of HP's Superdome server has leapt after the company sacked an employee who admitted committing industrial sabotage.

Hock-Beng Lim confessed in September to cutting cables, reformatting hard disks and setting reset commands. Since his departure an independent test has revealed that Superdome has nearly doubled the speed at which it is able to communicate with a database.

It took HP some time to fathom quite why Superdome was consistently under-performing in measurement tests. In total the company ploughed more than $1m into trying to get to the root of the problem.

Industry watchers were quick to criticise the speed with which HP dealt with the crisis.

Clive Longbottom, service director at Quocirca, said: "This shows HP doesn't have control over its internal processes - if something like this happens they should be on it in a flash."