Hewlett-Packard, which has been the main backer of Intel’s Itanium processors, is planning to refresh its entire line of Integrity servers with the new Itanium 9100 series processors, the Palo Alto, Calif., company announced Nov. 8.
Since it first began co-developing Itanium with Intel in the 1990s, HP has stuck by the processors as the main engine for its high-end Integrity systems as well as its NonStop high-availability platform. Although HP remains the only top-tier OEM to use Itanium, other companies, notably Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi, also use the Itanium processor.
Michelle Weiss, the vice president of marking for HP’s Business Critical Systems, said that while the new Itanium processors, which went by the code name Montvale, are important to the company’s high-end offerings, HP is focusing on making continual improvements to these systems in order to compete against IBM’s Power-based servers, especially the System p, and Sun Microsystems’ SPARC-based hardware.
As part of that initiative, Weiss said that HP is adding its Lights-Out remote management tools across its Integrity line, including all its Itanium-based blades, its Superdome Unix servers, and the NonStop portfolio.
The company is also adding power management tools. Weiss said these additions, plus Integrity’s support for a number of different operating systems and 13,000 third-party applications, should keep HP competitive with IBM and Sun.
“The overall strategy is to continue to make the Integrity line part of HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure and part of that is adding in the Lights-Out computing environment just like we have with our ProLiant and other industry standard x86 servers,” said Weiss. “Part of the Adaptive Infrastructure is to look at what customers need in terms of business-critical solutions that offer high availability and the ability to scale up. That’s what we offer when it comes to Integrity.”
The changes to HP’s Integrity line and NonStop servers will take place during the next several months as each individual system is upgraded to the new Itanium 9100 series processors, Weiss said.
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