Were I a cynic, I'd suggest that Hewlett-Packard's announcement last week of improvements to its Integrity server line was an effort to get the words HP and Integrity in the same sentence.
OK, cheap shots aside, the company announced last week that it's implanted the Intel Itanium 2 dual-core Montecito chip into the members of its Integrity server line, the HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers. (Alan Zeichick looked at the Integrity rx1620-2 last year.)
The refurbished servers, HP claims, deliver twice the performance of the previous Integrity servers. Specifically, the company claims that its current HP rx4640 4p/4c with Oracle 10g Enterprise Edition runs at 161,217 tpmC, whereas the forthcoming HP rx6600 4p/8c with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 (SP1) runs at 344,928 tpmC.
Additionally, HP reports to have extended the Integrity line's OS support of HP Virtual Server Environment for Integrity servers to help customers grow and shrink virtual servers.
The HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers also will include the HP zx2 chipset, which the company asserts delivers up to twice the energy efficiency of previous generations and slashes power and cooling costs by up to 50 percent.
"This new server lineup is a key example of HP's Adaptive Infrastructure offerings, which help customers stay ahead of changing business and IT demands and enable them to build cost-effective, next-generation data centers," said Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager, Business Critical Servers, at HP.
Later this year, HP plans to add support for Windows to HP Integrity Virtual Machines and allow multiple operating system instances to share a single processor. At that time, HP plans to extend support for HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor and Virtualization Manager to from HP-UX 11i to Windows and Linux.
The new Integrity servers, due out in December, will include HP's latest OpenVMS v8.3 OS.
Go here for more information about HP's Integrity line.
Posted by Ted Samson on September 9, 2006 09:45 PM
