Hewlett-Packard challenges IBM and Sun with its new server and storage range - Analysis

Rethink IT, March, 2004

Hewlett Packard is getting aggressive in many areas of its business this year, and the past few weeks have seen it turn its attention to its core server and storage units, throwing down the price/performance gauntlet to IBM and Sun.

The company brought out an entirely new server range for its HP-UX-based 9000 machines, by introducing a new, 50% faster base chip, which comes with two processing cores on it, rather than one. This new 8800 dual core chip replaces the 8700 and will come in combinations from one pair on a single chip to machines with 128 servers.

The 64-bit 8800, codenamed Mako, is the last but one chip from the old HP PA Risc series, with the 8900 due to come in 12 to 15 months' time. After that, HP customers who want to continue to grow beyond the existing range will need to shift over to Itanium-based servers.

The new HP 9000 systems share common components with the Itanium-based Integrity server line, which HP hopes will make for a smooth changeover at some time in the future. This includes cell boards, cabinets, memory and the HP zx1 and sx1000 chipsets.

UPGRADING IS SIMPLE

The 8800, and indeed the 8900s to come, can just be swapped into the space the existing 8700 chips leave. HP intends to make it possible to do the same with Itanium 2 chips. The machines run HP-UX 11iv1, unchanged from the 8700 devices.

Because the PA 8800 has two processors and is 50% faster per processor, HP reckons that customers will get 2.5 times better performance with an upgrade.

Inside, the PA 8800 chip uses the same system bus as the Intel Itanium.

The top end of the new range will be a new 128-way HP 9000 Superdome server, and it will also come out in a 32-way rp8420-32 server, an rp7420-16, an rp4440-8 server, an rp3440-4 server and just a two-way rp3410-2 server.

HP also introduced a new entry level Integrity Itanium-based machine, the rx1600, priced at under $3,000 and suited for clustered environments running Linux or HP-UX with Intel Itanium 2 processors. Customers can put up to 40 of these servers in a single rack.

Finally, new models of the HP Integrity rx2600 servers, based on the low voltage Itanium processors and with entry prices below $5,700, were launched. These are for customers who want two-CPU servers that have more memory and faster I/O capability than the entry level servers. These can also run Windows 2003 as well as Linux and HP-UX. SuSE Linux has also now been made available.

These Integrity servers also will be offered as nodes within HP XC6000 Linux clusters, which are scalable up to 512 nodes, for high-performance computing.

HP also continued the OpenVMS operating system into release 8.1 operating system for HP Integrity servers.

All the servers are available now except the 128 way Superdome, which is out later this month.

HP gave a price indication for the new HP 9000 Superdome as $309,000 for four PA-8800 processors, 4Gb memory, chassis, cell boards and I/O.

STORAGE STRATEGY ENHANCED

As well as bringing out an entire new range of HP-UX servers, Hewlett-Packard also tweaked its storage strategy, announcing the host channel adapters to enable InfiniBand support for its Integrity Intel-based servers.

InfiniBand is a loose, clustering technology, developed by Intel initially as a replacement for its PCI bus. InfiniBand is a high speed, switched fabric architecture that can connect servers, routers, storage and other peripherals in an any-to-any communications structure. Each InfiniBand subnet can support up to 64,000 nodes.

InfiniBand supports both copper and fiber, with fiber offering links of up to a kilometer in distance. It has a 2.5Gb/second wire speed and has three flavors for fiber connection at 500Mb, 2Gb and 6Gb per second.

IBM introduced a similar InfiniBand capability to its Linux servers last month.

The InfiniBand capability is pitched at customers who want to deploy scalable clusters for technical and engineering applications.

InfiniBand is expected to be available in April for high performance technical solutions, and in the fourth quarter of 2004 for highly available clusters for commercial database applications.

Hewlett-Packard has also introduced a pay-per-use financing program for its HP StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array family.

PAY FOR WHAT YOU USE

Effectively HP is saying "install more storage than you need and put a meter on it and pay for what you use." This system is already in use on its StorageWorks Disk Arrays for large enterprise customers and is effectively added to the StorageWorks EVA3000 and EVA5000 systems which hold up to 24 and 35 terabyres of data, respectively, for smaller businesses.

Finally, HP introduced the HP StorageWorks ESL E-series tape libraries in both LTO Ultrium 460 and SDLT 320 formats describing them as self-aware tape systems designed specifically for use in SAN environments.

Pricing for the HP StorageWorks ESL E-series tape libraries begins at $132,000 with expected availability later this month.