HP Delivers Unix-Itanium Blade Server

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been a long time coming, but Hewlett-Packard has finally put a blade server into the market that can run its HP-UX variant of the Unix operating system, something that a number of customers have been clamoring for recently and HP has finally delivered. Ironically, HP-UX blade servers have been in the works for more than seven years. There are good reasons why they are only coming out now.

The issue about bringing the HP-UX blade server to market had as much to do with market demands as it did with technology roadmaps, says Brian Cox, director of server marketing for HP's Business Critical Servers unit, which creates and sells HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop servers as well as sells the legacy Tru64 Unix platform. For one thing, HP has changed blade architectures from its original plans. HP's original "Powerbar" blade servers that were first announced back in May 2001 and began shipments in December of that year. The Powerbar blades adhered to the Compact PCI (cPCI) form factor standard then-current in the telecommunications and service provider industries; the other blade server at the time was Compaq's "QuickBlade" ProLiant BL e-Class server. The Powerbar machines initially used a 700 MHz Pentium III low voltage processor and the Powerbar chassis was designed like other telecom equipment, with front and back loading of blades. That chassis could hold a total of 16 processor blades in the front, 16 blades on the back for incremental storage, plus an additional six blades for switching and other functions, and at the time HP said that blade servers were less about density than they were about integrating network functions, ease of management, simpler and more compact network designs, and standards. HP has been proven right on all of those counts--except the standards, and to HP's credit, it was the first company to espouse the idea of standards, and did so from the first moment it opened its mouth about blades. Standards were not an afterthought, and the Powerbar blades proved it.

When the Powerbar blades began shipping in December 2001, HP was promising that in 2002 it would deliver blades using its own PA-RISC processors and supporting the HP-UX operating system, and that when Intel had faster and cooler Itanium processors ready for market, it would eventually use these in Powerbar blades, too. Then the Compaq merger happened, and everyone thought that density and low-power was going to be what blade servers were all about, so the Powerbar design and all the talk about standards was tossed overboard and the combined HP-Compaq pressed on with the QuickBlade blade server, which could cram 280 low-powered Pentium III-based blades into a 42U rack--that's 2.5 times as many as the Powerbars. But a funny thing happened. People didn't buy the ProLiant BL e-Class machine because it didn't have enough oomph, internal disk expansion, and connectivity to SANs, and the Compaq-ized HP quickly put together a different chassis--the p-Class chassis it still sells today--with beefier Xeon processors and a lot less density (because of the heating issues) and nothing even vaguely resembling a standard blade form factor or bus interface.

Since those p-Class blades were announced three years ago, HP has been talking about how it would deliver an HP-UX blade, but it never saw the light of day. Again, part of the problem was the somewhat jumpy and unpredictable nature of the Itanium roadmap, particularly for low-powered parts. At first, HP was clearly thinking--as was the entire industry except perhaps IBM, which waited two years and never did anything other than two-socket blades--that it needed low-powered PA-RISC and Itanium processors for blades. But then Linux took off, and Windows was making such headway, that HP was just happy to sell Linux and Windows blades. Of course, the lack of an HP-UX blade probably helped HP sell some Linux blades--as well as its competitors. Having an HP-UX blade before now would have probably been a good defensive maneuver, but that is water under the bridge now. At any rate, customers kept telling server makers that what they want is blades that do what pizza box servers do, but with greater density. It would have been very difficult to do this with "Merced" and "McKinley" Itanium processors, and moreover, the kinds of application server and database server workloads that HP-UX customers did want to put on blades would not run well on a clocked-down Itanium chip.

With the advent of the "Madison" Itanium 2 processors, HP could have surely used any number of different chips to offer a range of blade servers--just as it does in its rx1620 and rx2620 rack-mounted Integrity servers. Exactly why HP didn't do this a year or more ago is unclear, since HP-UX 11i was running on Madison processors quite well and Intel surely wanted to sell those chips. The only logical explanation is that demand wasn't there, and now it is.

So, HP-UX shops can now run their workloads on a blade server, and in fact, they can plug the new Itanium-based BL60p blade server into the same "QuickBlade-II" BladeSystem chassis as HP's existing Xeon- and Opteron-based blades plug into--and customers can even mix and match across all three in a single chassis. The p-Class chassis supports up to eight two-socket blades. The blades are based on HP's own "Pluto" zx1 chipset, which on the blade supports a 400 MHz front side bus; it supports from 1 GB to 8 GB of main memory. It includes two QLogic Fibre Channel controllers to link to SANs, four Gigabit Ethernet ports, space for two 3.5-inch SCSI disks for local storage. The BL60p blade has the same integrated Lights Out management service processor as ProLiant servers do, and managed using the same OpenView and System Insight Manager tools that HP has created to span the ProLiant and Integrity server lines.

Somewhat surprisingly, the BL60p blade supports the single-core 1.6 GHz/3MB Madison processor from Intel, not slower chips. Cox says that the sweet spot for the HP-UX blade is line-of-business applications, and customers want performance as well as the blade form factor. So don't expect low-voltage Itaniums running HP-UX unless customers start clamoring for them. That seems unlikely because the Integrity Virtual Machine (Integrity VM for short, which is a follow-on to the vPar partitions HP sold on earlier HP-UX 11i versions) software that runs on HP-UX can carve a single blade into six virtual HP-UX partitions. It is smarter to carve up on bigger blade than have smaller blades.

A base BL60p blade with one processor and 1 GB of main memory costs $5,695. And Integrity rx1620-2 server with the same processor and 1 GB of memory costs $5,267, but it does not include an HP-UX 11i license. The BL60p includes HP-UX 11i Foundation Edition, which costs around $750 and is certainly not free on other Integrity machines. The Enterprise Edition of HP-UX 11i costs $6,150 per processor and the Mission Critical Edition costs $10,250 per processor. This is not a cheap operating system by any stretch of the imagination. The BL60p blade is also eligible for 24-hour proactive maintenance services, which are offered on the Integrity servers but not on the ProLiants, as well as what is called "critical service," which guarantees that HP will not only respond promptly, but will be on site and have a problem fixed within six hours.

The BL60p blade server will be available in late December or early January supporting HP-UX. As for the future, Linux and Windows and maybe even OpenVMS will eventually be supported on the BL60p blade server. Linux and Windows support will come as fast as HP can get the operating system versions through it rigorous testing and certification processes. As for more scalable blades, next year will see the "Montecito" dual-core Itaniums come to market as well as HP's own "Arches" chipset. Cox hints that HP is working on "more modular designs," whatever that means, and that "this is not the single-shot Integrity blade from HP."