HP Launches AMD -Istanbul’ Servers, High-Density System

Hewlett-Packard is expanding its portfolio of servers designed to improve performance while also increasing energy efficiency.

A key part of the HP announcement June 2 is the launch of seven ProLiant G6 servers powered by Advanced Micro Devices’ new six-core “Istanbul” Opteron processors, which were officially released June 1.

In addition, HP is unveiling a new highly dense Intel-based ProLiant platform aimed at such compute-intense environments as HPC (high-performance computing), cloud computing and Web 2.0, according to Paul Gottsegen, vice president of integrated marketing for HP’s Enterprise Storage and Servers unit.

The company also is rolling out a tower server powered Intel’s new Xeon 5500 Series “Nehalem EP” processors and offering DDR3 memory.

The launch of these energy-efficient systems coincide with World Environment Day June 5, Gottsegen said in an interview.

HP initially rolled out its sixth-generation ProLiant systems in March in conjunction with Intel’s release of its Nehalem EP chips. The new systems come with a host of new features designed to improve performance, virtualization and management capabilities while driving down power and cooling costs.

“The hallmark of the whole G6 [portfolio] is you don’t have to compromise on performance to get energy efficiency,” Gottsegen said.

With the new features, the G6 ProLiants-which include tower, rack and blade servers-use half the power of previous generations. There also are 32 sensors in each server to monitor the heat and adjust the fans accordingly.

Other features include Dynamic Power Capping, which lets administrators dynamically set the power drawn by systems, and the ProLiant Onboard Administrator, which gives users centralized control of the systems, from setup and health to power optimization. HP Insight Control Environment lets administrators manage their server infrastructures on-site or remotely.