HP Debuts Skinny Itanium-Linux Boxes

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard may be making a lot of noise this week as it revamps the HP 9000 RISC/Unix server line with dual-core PA-8800 processors, but that's not all the company has up its sleeves. HP also will roll out two slim rx Series servers, based on the "Deerfield" Low Voltage Itanium 2. These machines support 64-bit Linux, 64-bit Windows, and 64-bit Unix will be attractive to customers building clusters of any of these three operating system platforms.

The rx Series of servers is also known as the Integrity line, based on HP's own zx1 "Pluto" and sx1000 "Pinnacles" chipsets. When a Pluto or Pinnacles machine is using an Itanium processor, it is called an Integrity server, and when using the new PA-8800 or the future PA-8900 RISC processor created by HP, it is called an HP 9000. Integrity machines can run the Itanium variants of Windows, HP-UX (11i v1.2), or Linux, while the HP 9000 machines can only run the HP-UX variant of Unix created for the PA-RISC chip (11i v1.1, to be specific).

The first new Integrity box is called the rx1600, and it is a 1U form factor rack-mounted server that can cram two Deerfield processors into a single box. The Deerfield chip, announced last year, runs at 1 GHz and has 1.5 MB of L3 cache memory. Like the Xeon DP processors, it was designed for two-way symmetric multiprocessing; the Xeon MP and "Madison" Itanium 2 processors were meant to scale from four-way SMP and higher. HP can jam two Deerfield processors into a 1U form factor only because the significantly smaller cache size of Deerfield (1.5 MB of L3 compared with 6 MB for the fastest Madison Itanium 2), and its lower clock speed (1 GHz in Deerfield compared with 1.5 GHz for the top-end Madison) allows the chip to consume only 63 watts of electricity under peak load. A "Gallatin" Xeon MP chip running at 2 GHz and with 2 MB of L3 cache has roughly the same performance on OLTP jobs and has a higher heat profile, consuming about 70 watts. The fastest Madison chips (which also have the largest caches) consume about 130 watts of juice as they run. You can see why there have not been any two-way, 1U Madison servers announced.

But commercial customers who want to take advantage of the superior floating point performance of Itanium have been egging on Intel and HP to create an inexpensive Deerfield chip, as well as the 1.4 GHz Low Voltage Madison (which has a smaller cache than a regular Madison, but not as small as Deerfield), because they want to get the best price/performance in a cluster that generates the least amount of heat. These customers are optimizing for three variables (price, performance, and heat), not just two (price and performance).

The rx1600 comes with a single Deerfield chip (expandable to two), 512 MB of main memory (expandable to 16 GB in eight DIMM slots), and a single 36 GB disk drive (it has two hot-plug SCSI drives). The rx1600 has two PCI-X slots, as well as multiple on-board Gigabit Ethernet ports. A base machine costs $2,800 and will become available worldwide in March. This puts a uniprocessor Itanium in roughly the same price range as a Xeon DP server. For some workloads, that Xeon machine will offer better bang for the buck; for others, where floating point performance and main memory expansion are issues, the Deerfield box will come out ahead.

HP also has announced that the rx2600 two-way, 2U form factor server will be able to use the Deerfield processor. The rx2600 is also based on the Pluto chipset. A base machine with one 1 GHz Deerfield chip, 1 GB of main memory, and one 36 GB disk drive costs $5,700. This is, again, about the same price you would pay for a 2U form factor Xeon DP machine with the same expandability as the Itanium box.