HP Adds Entry Itanium Servers, Finally Delivers HP-UX 11i v3

Published: February 15, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard today will continue to refresh its Itanium-based Integrity server line with Intel's dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 processors, adding an entry server and a blade server to the lineup. The company will also finally ship the next version of its HP-UX operating system for PA-RISC and Itanium servers, HP-UX 11i v3. The Itanium servers will support HP-UX 11i v2, the new v3, as well as Windows, Linux, and eventually the OpenVMS proprietary platform.

First, the servers. 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, which is announced today, 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.

HP-UX 11i v2 is supported on the blade machine, and customers can choose from the three variants of HP-UX as well: Foundation, Enterprise, or Mission Critical. The Foundation variant is the basic HP-UX, while Enterprise adds the Virtual Server Environment for vPar virtual and nPar hardware partitions and Mission Critical adds the MC ServiceGuard fault tolerant clustering.

Oddly enough, HP will not have HP-UX 11i v3 certified on the blade until sometime in the second half of this year; HP-UX 11i v2 is certified on the blade now, and so is Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux AS and ES 4, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, and HP's own OpenVMS 8.3.

According to Marcus Berber, Integrity blade server strategist inside HP's Business Critical Systems division, the company has cut the price of HP-UX on this blade as well so it can compete with other Unix and Linux blade offerings. After a price cut on HP-UX that was quietly announced last fall (there was no formal announcement, which seems foolish), the price of HP-UX Foundation was cut to $495. But on the BL860c blade, it only costs $150 per socket. That's less than the cost of a Linux license. SLES 10 lists for $349 per license. But then again, that is per machine, not per core, and the street price is around $250. Still, HP-UX Foundation still costs $990 on the rx2660 with two sockets populated, and it is $690 cheaper on the BL860c blade equipped with two Montecitos. That is a big savings.

HP-UX 11i v3 is available now on the rx2660, as are the other operating systems that have been certified on the new blade--including HP-UX 11i v2.

HP-UX 11i v3, of course, has been a long time coming, and is being rolled out to customers more than three years after the first release of 11i v2 came to market. HP has previewed a number of the major features that made it into the update of its Unix variant, and has provided a skeletal roadmap for the next two versions looking ahead, which will come out every two to three years.

HP-UX 11i v3 was subject to a number of problems, including the merging of features of Compaq/Digital's Tru64 Unix and its TruCluster clustering extensions--a technical job that was eventually abandoned when HP decided a few years ago to just partner with the then-independent Veritas (now owned by Symantec) and stop trying to graft TruCluster--a ingenious file system and server operating system clustering extension that started out on VMS and was eventually extended to Digital's Unix--onto HP-UX. Intel's delays with the Itanium chip also played havoc with the HP-UX roadmap, since operating system features were pegged to specific hardware features in the operating system.

The key improvements in HP-UX 11i are in the Virtual Server Environment, which allows the provisioning of server CPU, memory, and I/O capacity to be driven by policies set by administrators ahead of situations, not after the fact and by hand when someone has gone wrong in a data center.

The HP-UX I/O subsystem had to be rewritten to cope with this dynamic virtual machine provisioning, and while HP was in the cuts of the operating system, it boosted the performance of this code and added multiple data path support for I/O, which improves resiliency. In rewriting the storage subsystem stack in the operating system, HP also expanded the amount of addressable storage in the HP-UX operating system to 100 zettabytes. (That is 100,000 terabytes.)

According to Nick Van Der Zweep, director of virtualization and utility computing across HP, HP-UX 11i v3 will also allow online patching of a copy of the HP-UX kernel, which can be tweaked and tested before it is rolled into production. (You have to reboot the system to apply the patch, however). HP-UX 11i v3 also has disk volume and file system encryption--a feature that was back-ported to HP-UX 11i v2 last year, in fact, from 11i v3.

There are goodies in HP-UX 11i v3 even if customers are not that keen on virtualizing their systems. According to Van Der Zweep, HP-UX 11i v3 was built using better compilers, and the company's software engineers have improved the threading performance on the HP-UX kernel by a factor of three to four. Other changes in the software add up to performance improvements with HP-UX 11i v3 on Itanium-based systems of around 30 percent, with some customers in early testing seeing 20 percent while others are seeing 40 percent or 50 percent. This is a boost in performance that comes without having to change iron or to recompile their code, and it applies to Itanium and PA-RISC systems alike--although Van Der Zweep did say that increases on PA-RISC machines would be smaller.

Moving to Arches or Titan systems improves performance, even using the same Madison processors, by 20 to 30 percent--mostly because of more main memory and more efficient use of I/O embodied in the chipset. And of course, the Montecito processors offer twice the performance of the Madison chips and many times the performance of the last PA-8900 processors from several years ago.

Customers who are on an HP-UX 11i v2 support contract can move to HP-UX 11i v3 for free. On new machines, Foundation costs $495 per socket on machines with two sockets (unless it is a blade server, in which case it costs $150 per socket). The Enterprise edition costs $3,395 per socket on a machine with two or four sockets and $4,770 per socket on a machine with eight or more sockets. The Mission Critical edition costs $6,865 per socket on a box with two or four sockets and $8,240 per socket on a machine with eight or more sockets.

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