Witness: The New HP Integrity Servers

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Well, this is
it. The Itanium 9300 processor was announced in February, and today, HP is
announcing the new HP
Integrity servers.

We could have
just thrown a faster processor, DDR 3 memory, and a new I/O  into our existing rack mount servers. But HP,
after talking to many of our customers, has decided to do something just a
little different.

HP has decided to bring mission critical systems to a bladed environment, providing customers with a modular, flexible server. Utilizing the c3000 and c7000 chassis, we can provide 2,
4, and 8 socket blades. These blades are modular. The base unit is a 2
socket, BL860c i2. Two of them linked together with our scalable BladeLink,
becomes a 4 socket, BL870c i2. Four BL860c i2 linked together becomes an 8
socket BL890c i2. This not only provides linear socket growth, but linear,
memory growth, linear hard drive growth, and linear I/O growth.

I'm very excited
about these blades, since they provide modularity and flexibility without
requiring an investment in a fairly large system. And yet, they still provide
scaling. For instance, you can put 2 BL890c i2 servers in a single 10 U, c7000
chassis. This provides 64 cores, 768 Gb of memory in 192 DIMM slots, 16 hard
drives, and if I remember correctly, 32 Virtual Connect Flex-10 connections.

This is a lot of
power in a single 10U c7000 chassis. And the nice part is, it can potentially
be configured in different ways - 2 BL890c i2 servers, 4 BL870c i2 servers, 8
BL860c i2 servers, or some combination in between. This is especially useful if
you want to start small, but want to have room to grow in the future without a
big up front investment. Or, if the workload shrinks (or is oversized), you can
potentially split a larger configuration into multiple, smaller configurations.
This is flexibility that helps businesses adapt to changing requirements.

HP also
announced the Superdome
2 server. This is a slightly larger system which basically swaps cell
boards in the original Superdome for cell blades in Superdome 2. It is a
modified c7000 chassis that has been stretched to provide a highly redundant
cross-bar fabric. I'll cover it in more detail in another post, but it is the
combination of a highly mission critical server with the flexibility of blades.

Finally, HP has
also announced a small rack mount server for those customers who don't need
larger, more flexible servers - the rx2800
i2. Once again, I will cover more about it in a later post.

I'm finished
with our internal training here in Frankfurt, so I'm heading across town to HP
Technology @ Work. I will post some more about these new systems and some of
the sessions I attend over the next few days.

Jacob