HP Puts Montvale Itaniums into Integrity Line

Published: November 8, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is no big surprise, of course, but server maker Hewlett-Packard will today announce that it is supporting the new "Montvale" dual-core Itanium 9100 series of processors in its Integrity and Integrity NonStop servers. As the largest seller of Itanium-based systems--accounting for somewhere around 85 percent to 90 percent of system sales--you would expect HP to be the first one out of the chute selling Montvale machines.

The Montvales will plug right into existing Integrity machines based on HP's "Arches" chipset, which made its debut in the spring of 2006 prior to the often-delayed delivery of the first dual-core Itaniums, the "Montecito" Itanium 9000s. The Montvale processors require HP-UX 11i v3 Release 1, code named "Vitality," and plug into the rx2660, rx3600, and rx6600 entry servers, the rx7640 and rx8640 midrange servers, the Superdome high-end servers, and the BL860c blades servers.

The Integrity NonStop clusters, which run HP's fault tolerant database and Unix operating system by the same name, have also been updated to use the Montvale chips. The prior generation of Integrity NonStop machines were based on the single-core "Madison" Itanium 2 processors, which are now three years old, so the move to Montvale is a big performance boost for these customers. (HP did not certify the Montecito dual-core Itaniums in the Integrity NonStop servers, for whatever reason.) NonStop customers are being told by HP that they can expect a 20 percent improvement in performance at the same price point by moving to the new gear; given the clustered nature of the NonStop machine, processor scalability is not such an important factor as it is in SMP boxes, but having said that, any given Montvale node should do roughly 2.4 times the work of a Madison node. What this should mean is that Integrity NonStop customers can buy fewer nodes to get the same work done.

According to Michelle Weiss, vice president of marketing for HP's Business Critical Systems unit inside of its Enterprise Storage and Servers division, HP has done a lot of work in the NonStop platform on the software side as well, allowing for Java and C++ applications coded in an SOA-style to be deployed on the NonStop platforms. HP's Insight Power Manager software and Thermal Logic cooling features have also been moved from the ProLiant line into the Integrities concurrent with the Montvale iron launch, and HP is definitely making used of the Demand Based Switching and other power-saving features in the Montvale chips. (HP is not, however, making use of Core-Level Lock Stepping, a new feature that Intel says help enhance the reliability of the Itanium processor and that no one has given a decent description of as yet.)

The entry NonStop machine is the NS1200, which is based on the rx2660 server. The NS1200 is a kicker to the current NS1000, which has from one to four chasses in a single node image and from 1 to 8 processor cores. The NS1200 doubles the processor core count from two to 16, and main memory scales from 2 GB to 16 GB per core in the node. HP is also shipping the NonStop 16200 with the Montvales, which will scale from two to 8,160 processor cores. HP has not yet announced when the NonStop 14200 will ship, but this machine should span from two to 4,080 processors. HP is opting for the 1.6 GHz Montvale with 12 MB of L3 cache for the NonStops. The NonStop OS H06.12 release is required to support Montvale processors.

HP's new OpenVMS 8.4 release of its venerable proprietary platform is also supported on the new Integrity iron with Montvale chips, as are Windows Server 2003 from Microsoft and Linuxes from Red Hat and Novell.

With the delays in the delivery of the Montecito and Montvale chips, which come to market at least a year later than planned (that's if you want to be generous to Intel), you might be thinking that HP might be a bit miffed about falling behind in the performance gap with competitive platforms, which are offering higher clock speeds or more cores. The quad-core "Tukwila" Itanium chips are supposed to market now, according to roadmaps from two years ago. This has also got to be a pain at some level. But Weiss says this is not a big problem for Integrity customers. "That's not the issue that our customers are worried about," she explains. "Raw performance is not a make or break issue for companies as they are running their businesses. Everybody has had slippages in their chip roadmaps, and we have set good expectations for the Montvales with our customers. And clearly, Tukwila will be a very big introduction for us."

HP's Integrity and Integrity NonStop businesses have been helped by IBM's delays in bringing Power6 chips to market, which are running about a year late, and the inability of Sun Microsystems to get its UltraSparc RK "Rock" processors to market before the second half of 2008. If IBM was on schedule with Power6 and Sun had Rock in the field, HP would not be so calm.

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