HP is refreshing its Integrity line of servers, incorporating the latest
dual-core “Montecito” release of Intel’s Itanium 2 processor.
With performance that is more than twice that of its earlier
generation, HP said the new Integrity’s have
“mainframe-caliber high availability at entry-level server prices.”
The latest Integrity’s also sport the new HP zx2 chipset, which HP claims
delivers more than two times the energy efficiency and cuts power and
cooling costs by up to 50 percent.
“It’s all about driving down enterprise costs,” Tim Danielsen, worldwide
product line manager, business critical systems at HP, told
internetnews.com.
As one example, Danielsen noted HP’s current rs 4640 single core
Integrity can deliver about 130 database transactions per watt. The newer
rx4640 can deliver about 270 database transactions per watt.
Pricing is about similar with the current generation. The low end starts
with the Integrity rx2620 priced at $4,884. Other models include the
Integrity rx3600 ($10,531), Integrity rx 4640 ($15,614), Integrity rx6600
($14,771), Integrity rx7640 ($33,058), Integrity rx8640 ($74,725) and the HP
Integrity Superdome ($209,389).
The Itanium has been a troubled processor dating from the initial hope
that it would be a mainstream high performance replacement for Intel’s
Pentium. But Itanium has been a winner
for HP, a co-developer of the processor before Intel took over. And
Danielsen claimed customers are “lining up” to buy the new systems.
“If you forget for a moment that Itanium was going to take over the
world, and judge it on its own merits, it’s a very capable high end
processor,” Gordon Haff, analyst with Illuminata, told
internetnews.com.
“HP is doing pretty well with it and with the multiple OS support, they
have a good application portfolio.”
HP announced there are now over 9,000 applications for Integrity, which
can run a range of operating systems, including HP-UX, Windows, Linux and
OpenVMS v8.3.
Danielsen noted that advances in HP’s virtualization technology will make
the multiple OS scenario more attractive. Later this year, HP said it plans
to add support for Windows to HP Integrity Virtual Machines, allowing Windows
and other OSes to run on a single processor.
“We see some companies that use SAP standardize on Unix, but they also
want Windows for business intelligence,” said Danielsen. “They can choose to
standardize on one server or deploy the OSes separately in partitions.”