Who needs Montecito?
HP at least says it can wait. The company is set to release
new models of its mid-range and high-end Integrity servers based on a new
chipset and other features it says speeds performance. The sx2000 replaces HP’s current sx1000
chipset.
Montecito, the code name for the first dual-core version of Itanium, was
originally slated for release last year but has been delayed until this
summer.
“When we compare the sx2000 to the sx1000, we have four times the memory
capacity, doubled the memory bandwidth, made a 25 percent reduction in
memory access latency, and improved the I/O,” Manuel Martull, worldwide
marketing manager of business critical servers at HP, told
internetnews.com.
“And that’s all using the current-generation
‘Madison’ Itanium processor.”
When Montecito does ship, users can upgrade from the current Itanium or
add Montecito-based systems to their mix. “Today’s announcement is about
buying into an infrastructure that supports Montecito,” said Martull.
HP is targeting a potentially huge, almost $24 billion replacement
market of RISC and CISC-based server environments in use today, according to
research by Gartner.
That multi-billion-dollar figure includes more than hardware. The company also announced improvements to its HP-UX 11i
operating environment, with significant capacity, virtualization and
management upgrades.
The enhancements are designed to offer greater server
capacity as well as faster deployment of enterprise software within an HP
Virtual Server Environment (VSE) running on the HP-UX 11i operating system.
HP said it will bring some virtualization projects online in
less than half the time it currently takes.
“Vendors that can approach customers with enhanced system capabilities
that speak to today’s need for sophisticated virtualization, management
tools and capacity boosts are taking a step in the right direction,” said
Gartner analyst Andrew Butler in a statement.
In a related announcement, HP released Global Instant Capacity for HP-UX 11i
which it said offers more flexibility in balancing workloads across multiple
data centers.
“You can move a license from one partition to another and across servers
in, for example, our Superdome environment,” said Ute Albert, worldwide
marketing manager of HP’s virtual server environment.
“It helps maximize
underutilized servers. We’re the first to market this kind of capability.”
HP said it’s invested a billion dollars in its Integrity servers and
venerable HP-UX software. Sales of Integrity have grown 94 percent year over
year, according to Albert.
