HP rolls out new Integrity servers

• New HP Integrity servers triple the performance of their predecessors, use 25% less power and reduce TCO by 33%
• HP also announces new advisory workshop services, financing programs and cost assessment tools to assist clients

HEWLETT-Packard’s Kelvin Khaw came out with all guns blazing when announcing his company’s new HP Integrity servers: How this hardware portfolio is ubiquitous in mission-critical applications across multiple industries all over the world.
 
“It’s likely that each and every one of you made use of our servers today without realizing it,” he told a group of technology journalists in Kuala Lumpur on March 12. “If you made a phone call or sent an SMS, it would have gone through an HP server – all the telcos in Malaysia use our servers.”
 
“If you used an ATM card or swiped a credit card, paid a bill online or used a courier service like DHL or Pos Malaysia, it would have gone through our servers,” said Khaw (pic), director of business-critical systems at HP’s Enterprise Group in South-East Asia and Malaysia.
 
He listed off other examples from around the world and in Malaysia: Flight reservation and control tower systems, and even all 911 calls in the United States. “In Malaysia, as in other parts of the region, the biggest part of our market is with the telco, banking and financial services, manufacturing and government sectors.”
 
HP says that at least 71% of the world’s Global 100 companies are powered by Integrity servers. Khaw was announcing the immediate availability of new models running on Intel ‘s Itanium 9500 processors, formerly known as Poulson.
 
Part of HP’s mission-critical Converged Infrastructure portfolio, the enhanced HP Integrity systems – when paired with the latest version of HP’s variant of the Linux operating system (OS), HP-UX – deliver triple the performance of their predecessors, while using nearly 25% less power and reducing the total cost of ownership (TC) by 33%.
 
And if physical space is also of concern, they all come in the same footprint as the older models, Khaw said.
 
Part of the lower power requirement and TCO savings stem from HP’s smart cache controller, which he said creates “a buffer between the applications and the hardware, reducing the overheads on both while allowing them to run faster.”
 
“Other systems increase their speed by upping the gigahertz, which ends up drawing on more power and adding to your TCO,” he claimed.
 
Since Integrity servers are used in mission-critical applications, downtime has to be cut down to virtually nil – computing workloads can be fully isolated with hard partitions.
 
“It’s like the difference between a bus and a train – with the latter, all the loads are partitioned into carriages, and if you have a problem or glitch in one, you can just isolate it,” Khaw said.
                                                                             
The HP Superdome 2 now offers a boost in scalability and performance with double the number of cores, HP said. Increased reliability is also achieved with enhancements that provide built-in intelligence that enables proactive detection, analysis and repair of errors.
 
The expanded portfolio also includes server blades that deliver improved resiliency with electrically isolated hard partitions that fully isolate workloads without compromising data integrity. The new server blades utilize reduced power with new low-voltage, dual in-line memory modules (DIMMS).
 
The new server blades include the HP IntegrityBL860c i4, which scales up to two sockets; the HP Integrity BL870c i4, with up to four socket configurations; and the HP Integrity BL890c i4, with up to eight sockets.
 
Additionally, the ENERGY STAR certified HP Integrity rx2800 i4 entry-level server improves energy efficiency, the company claimed.
 
Enhancements to the HP-UX 11iv3 operating system enable clients to:

• Improve security with a new common log file that delivers up to 10 times faster threat detection than previous generations;

• Simplify management with HP Capacity Advisor’s new analysis tool that identifies idle and under- or over-utilized servers to increase server efficiency; and

• Double the size of HP-UX workloads supported within the same data center footprint with up to 256 cores per server.

HP also announced new advisory workshop services, financing programs and cost assessment tools to assist clients.
 
The HP Platform Advisory Workshop will assist clients in planning their future mission-critical environments or transition from legacy servers – including those from its competitors, said Khaw -- to HP Integrity with recommendations for optimization, migration and risk mitigation.
 
Upon completion, clients receive a customized blueprint of their organization’s ideal transition path to the newest Integrity systems, the company said.
 
An enhanced TCO Calculator helps mission-critical customers assess the TCO for maintaining existing infrastructure and help determine the cost to transition and support the new servers.
 
HP said it would continue to enhance established HP Integrity platforms supporting HP-UX, HP NonStop and OpenVMS operating systems.  Over time, these advancements will cascade to mission-critical x86 platforms delivering a single, unified infrastructure for Unix, Microsoft Windows and Linux environments.
 
However, Khaw said that the future would be with Linux and Windows. “The world is moving away from Unix,” he said, citing the latest IDC report on the worldwide server market in 2012.
 
The key findings from IDC include:

• Linux server demand was positively impacted by high performance computing (HPC) and cloud infrastructure deployments, as hardware revenue improved 12.7% year over year in 4Q12 to US$3 billion. Linux servers now represent 20.4% of all server revenue, up 1.7 points when compared with the fourth quarter of 2011.

• Microsoft Windows server demand continued to increase in the fourth quarter of 2012 as hardware revenue increased 3.2% year over year. Quarterly revenue of US$6.7 billion for Windows servers represented 45.8% of overall quarterly factory revenue, the same share as in the prior year's quarter.

• Unix servers experienced a revenue decline of 24.1% year over year to US$2.6 billion representing 17.6% of quarterly server revenue. This was the sixth consecutive quarter of revenue decline in the Unix server market and all major Unix server vendors experienced a revenue decline when compared with the fourth quarter of 2011.

The first new HP Integrity systems, including the Superdome 2 server blades, are available at a starting price of US$6,490 per blade (suggested US list price).
 
Related Story:

You’ve not seen a rack like this one: HP’s Gen8 servers

For more technology news and the latest updates, follow @dnewsasia on Twitter or Like us on Facebook.