HP Monday upgraded its Integrity line of servers with the
new Intel Intanium 2 chips, code-named Madison, shoring up what they believe
is a fine balance between offering high-performance computing at reasonable
prices in a soft economy.
The Palo Alto, Calif. company announced the upgrade concurrently with
Intel’s Madison release. Not to be outdone, rival IBM Monday also unveiled
its own line of servers based on the 1.5 gigahertz processor.
Now tailored for HP’s adaptive enterprise strategy to let customers grab
computing power as they need it, the Integrity family, inherited from Compaq
in the megamerger more than a year ago, ranges from one-and two- processor
entry-level systems up to a 64-processor HP Integrity Superdome server.
Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise
storage and servers for business critical services at HP, said one of things
that makes the revamped line so attractive, is that it can run UNIX, Windows
and Linux on a single system at the same time, thanks to HP’s partitioning
This means customers can use the machines to marry resources from disparate
environments to raise scalability, availability and performance with fewer
resources. This yields a greater return-on-investment.
The HP Integrity Superdome comes in 16-, 32- and 64-processor
configurations, while the four-processor HP Integrity rx5670 and
two-processor HP Integrity rx2600 entry-level servers have been upgraded
with Itanium 2, as well as 6MB of level 3 cache This fall, the company plans
to introduce mid-range Integrity systems with eight and 16 processors. All
of the servers will run HP-UX11i, Windows Server 2003 and Linux. Integrity
servers sporting HP’s OpenVMS operating system are planned for next year.
The new HP Integrity Superdome servers are slated to roll out in August with
prices starting at $262,000. The Integrity rx5670 will be for sale in July
$27,000, while the small business rx2600 will debut the same time for
$5,400.
Like IBM, HP also said it will support two major Intel architectures,
IA-32/Xeon and IA-64/Itanium. The company pledged to upgrade the HP ProLiant
DL560, DL580, ML570, DL740 and DL760 servers and ProLiant BL40p blade server
with the Intel Xeon processor MP at speeds up to 2.8 GHz in July.
Marcello said the Itanium 2-based systems feature more than 700 applications
from software vendors such as BEA, Microsoft, Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, SAS,
and Siebel, with more than 1,000 applications to be available by year’s end.
He also said HP has lined up key customers for the new Integrity servers,
including Raymond James Financial, which is using Integrity Superdome server
running Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Windows server 2003 Datacenter
Edition, and Airbus UK.
Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said because HP has been in for Itanium 2 all
along, it sits squarely in the driver’s seat as the market leader in selling
the systems. This is a favorable position, but Haff said HP also should be
careful.
“Now HP has to strike a delicate balance around their message,” Haff said.
“On the one hand, they get to jump up and down and say, ‘we’re No. 1’. On
the other, they don’t want Itanium to be known as an HP chip rather than a
64-bit equivalent of IA-32.”
To accommodate the Integrity line, HP also unveiled the Itanium 2-based HP
Workstation zx6000, which features up to 50 percent increased application
performance for scientific and technical applications. It is available now
for $4,895.
In related news, rival systems maker Dell announced a new PowerEdge 3250 server with Itanium 2 processors starting at $5,999. An 8-node cluster for high performance computing is priced at $88,600.
Dell will also offer Intel’s Xeon MP processors with up to
2.8GHz speed and 2MB embedded cache on the PowerEdge 6650 and 6600 four-way
servers with prices starting at $5,999 and $5,499, respectively.
HP Greets Madison Chips with Revamped Integrity Line
