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Continuing to offer its Integrity servers as a powerful alternative to RISC-based systems from IBM and Sun, HP this week is expected to unveil a range of updates to its Itanium 2-based servers, the upgrades include faster processors, enhanced virtualization capabilities, support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and a pay-per-use option for Windows users.
In addition, HP is set to announce that it is now shipping OpenVMS 8.2 for Integrity servers, a long-awaited port of the Alpha server operating system to Itanium. OpenVMS support adds one more option for customers who already have the choice of running HP-UX, Linux or Windows on Integrity servers, and is aimed at making it easier for existing Alpha customers to make the move to Itanium.
"There's nothing shocking here. But overall you look at this announcement in its entirety and you say HP is making progress down the Itanium road," says Gordon Haff.an analyst at Illuminata.
The updates come a month after HP announced it was handing off its Itanium processor design team to Intel. At that time, HP stressed its commitment to Itanium and said it would invest $3 billion over the next three years in its Integrity servers, which compete in the $20 billion RISC market.
This week's announcements represent part of that $3 billion investment. Among the updates are:
* Availability of new Itanium 2 processors with 9M bytes of cache, which HP says offer up to a 25% performance increase over the existing Itanium 2 with 6M bytes of cache.The new chips can work alongside older Itanium 2 processors in the same box.
* Pay-per-use pricing for Windows systems. HP has used automated metering technology to measure CPU use and charge accordingly for its Unix servers for a couple of years, and this announcement extends the option to Windows platforms.
* Global Workload Manager, which lets customers move resources and workloads between servers to maximize efficiency In the past, Workload Manager could move loads only within a single server. Global Workload Manager is supported on HP-UX and Linux today but HP says Windows and OpenVMS support is coming.
* Support for SuSE Linux ES 9, built on the Linux 2.6 kernel,letting customers run Linux on boxes with as many as 16 processors.
HP sees growing interest in its Integrity servers, which run some 3,000 applications. That software support is double what it was a year ago and is expected to reach 4,500 applications by year-end, says Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing for HP's business-critical servers. He says sales associated with Integrity systems, including software, storage and services,surpassed $1 billion in 2004.
That's good news for HP, which co-developed Itanium with Intel and is transitioning all of its 64-bit offerings onto the Itanium platform. This latest generation of the chip has gotten high reviews from analysts, who note that the processor has been slow to take off since it was introduced in 2001 because of performance problems and the complexity of porting applications to the new instruction set.
IBM and Dell are among a handful of other vendors that sell Itanium 2-based servers.but HP is by far the biggest Itanium backer. HP expects Integrity server sales to account for half of all business-critical server sales by year-end and 70% by the end of 2006.
Dave Geiver.vice president of technology for Premier Bankcard, which services the credit card accounts for First Premier Bank in Sioux Falls, S.D., brought in three Integrity servers to support a Microsoft SQL database and business intelligence applications early last year. He says the shift to the 64-bit Itanium platform - and 64-bit applications - enabled him to improve performance substantially Queries that once took 23 hours to complete can be done in one hour and 45 minutes, he says.
"And queries that took 45 minutes are now down to 2 minutes," he says.'The performance increases at the user level have been incredible."
Geiver says he plans to update his boxes with the new Itanium 2 processors in the next six months. In addition, he says he's analyzing the pay-per-use option available to him as a Windows user.
Copyright Network World Inc. Jan 17, 2005
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
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