HP Adds Entry Itanium Rack and Blade Servers

Published: February 27, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard has continued to refresh its Itanium-based Integrity server line with Intel's dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 processors, and has added an entry server and a blade server to the lineup. The Itanium servers will support HP-UX 11i v2, the new v3, as well as Windows, Linux, and eventually the OpenVMS proprietary platform.

The new entry point in the Integrity server line is the rx2660. It uses HP's own "Titan" zx2 chipset, the second generation of chipsets for entry servers (and workstations when HP used to sell Itanium-based workstations years ago). The Titan chipset is the younger sibling to the "Arches" sx2000 chipset that is used in midrange machines with more than four processor sockets; Titan is the kicker to the sx1 chips, which were code-named "Pluto." The Arches chipset was supposed to be timed to market with the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium chips, which were delayed into 2006 but originally promised (several times) years earlier. Ditto for the Titan chipset. Both Arches and Titan have expanded memory and I/O capabilities that are key to the increasingly virtualized HP-UX, Linux, and Windows environments that end up on Integrity platforms.

The rx3660 and rx6600 servers announced in September 2006 were based on the Titan chipset. The rx3660 is a two-socket, 4U rack-mounted server that can use either single-core "Madison" Itanium 2 chips or dual-core Montecitos, but there is very little reason to go with the single-core chip, given that the dual-core chip provides twice the performance for essentially the same price and in a lower thermal envelope. The rx3660 spans from 2 GB to 96 GB of main memory, and supports 1.4 GHz/12 MB and 1.6 GHz/18 MB variants of the Montecito chips. The rx6600 is a four-socket box that comes in a 7U chassis, supports the top-end 1.6 GHz/24 MB Itanium 9000 part, and spans up to 192 GB of main memory. Both are very powerful machines, and they can stand toe-to-toe with anything IBM or Sun Microsystems can throw into a competitive situation. In fact, the Montecito and Titan/Arches combo is what the promise of Itanium was all about in the first place. It is a pity that the machines are about two years late to market.

The rx2660 is even later to market, but it will make up for it (at least HP hopes) by being very powerful and aggressively priced--good enough to give a two-socket ProLiant machine running Windows or Linux a run for the money. The machine offers from 1 GB to 32 GB of DDR2 main memory, three PCI-X or PCI-Express peripheral slots (customers get to choose, based on model), internal RAID 1, 5, or 6 data protection for the four SAS drives in the 2U form factor. The rx2660 supports 36 GB, 73 GB, and 146 GB SAS drives, and maxes out at 1.2 TB of internal storage. It supports three different Montecito parts: 1.4 GHz/12 MB, 1.6 GHz/6 MB, and 1.6 GHz/18 MB, and has two Gigabit Ethernet ports on the motherboard.

One obvious place where HP wants to push the rx2660 is into high performance supercomputing clusters, given the fast floating point processors in the Montecito chips. Up until now, the rx3660 was too fat for the amount of flops it delivered. The rx2660 is much more suited to HPC clusters, in that it is denser and has fewer high-end features that HPC customers don't want to pay for. The machine will also be available in a pedestal configuration for office rather than data center environments, and if fan noise is an issue, HP wants to sell you an rx2660 with a special reduced-noise pedestal case. An entry rx2660 will cost $4,931.

HP's blade story when it comes to Itanium has been a little on the weak side, but it is hoping to get some HP-UX, OpenVMS, Linux, and Windows shops fired up about the Integrity BL860c blade, which is similar in feature set to the rx2660, but which plugs into HP's ProLiant c-Class blade chassis. The c-Class blades are a big improvement in density and performance over the prior generation of BladeSystem chasses, the e-Class and the p-Class.

The BL860c blade server is also based on the Titan chipset and has room for two dual-core Montecito chips. The blade supports the same Montecito variants, but offers more memory at a maximum of 48 GB. The blade, which sits vertically in the BladeSystem machine, has room for two SAS drives (side-by-side) at the top of the blade. It also includes a DVD drive tilted sideways, and supports three mezzanine cards for I/O expansion should customers want to add external peripherals. RAID 1 disk mirroring is supported on the motherboard of the BL860c blade.

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