Hewlett-Packard is bringing its high-end Integrity server platform
into its converged infrastructure strategy.
HP officials on April 26 rolled out a refreshed line of
Integrity systems powered by Intel’s newest Itanium
9300 “Tukwila” processors and built on a bladed architecture that covers
everything from the lowest-end x86 ProLiant systems to the newest Superdome
system.
With the new systems, enterprises can mix and match the broad
range of infrastructure offerings—to include not only servers but also
networking, storage and systems management—within their data centers, according
to Michael Mcnerney, director of server planning and marketing for HP’s
Business Critical Systems unit.
“As we talk with customers … the value of this integration is
huge as they try to eliminate the silos in their data centers,” Mcnerney said
in an interview. “Mission-critical systems used to be a silo. Not anymore.”
HP is in a tight competition with Cisco Systems, IBM,
Dell and other vendors as they look to offer businesses tightly integrated data
center solutions that bring together server, storage, networking,
virtualization and management software.
Cisco is using its
UCS (Unified Computing System) as the basis for its converged data center
offering, which also includes products from EMC
and VMware. IBM is using a combination of
its own products and networking offerings from partners, and Dell
is partnering with such vendors as Egenera and Brocade to give what Dell
officials call a more open and flexible offering.
HP officials are looking to rely greatly on their own
technologies. The new Superdome 2—the first refresh of the high-end system in
10 years—is an example of this strategy. The system shares a common management
environment, power supplies, fans and I/O options with all other HP data center
systems, and its modular bladed design means it can fit in a standard C7000
rack, Mcnerney said.
HP also has brought its Virtual Connect technology to the
Integrity line, and with the new architecture, users can run multiple
applications side by side in the same enclosure.
In addition, Superdome 2, which will be available later this
year, includes more than 100 RAS features,
such as the Crossbar Fabric, which automatically routes data between blades and
I/O with complete redundancy, improving reliability by up to 450 percent.
HP also unveiled new Integrity server blades that can scale
from two sockets to eight sockets through the vendor’s Blade Link technology.
Blade Link lets IT administrators combine multiple blades to make two-, four-
and eight-socket systems, delivering nine times the performance in half the
footprint of previous versions, officials said.
“We’re redefining how you scale in a blade chassis,” Mcnerney said.
In addition, enterprises can run the new Integrity blades,
ProLiant systems and StorageWorks blades in the same enclosure.
HP also is offering the Integrity rx2800 i2 rack server that
can be housed in a standard enclosure and is aimed at smaller or remote
locations. HP’s all-in-one Matrix data center offering also now supports HP-UX.
Mcnerney said the current version of the operating system,
HP-UX 11i v3, can run on the new Integrity servers, enabling businesses to
easily move their workloads to the new systems.
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