HP Refreshes Entry Integrity Line with New Itaniums

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Intel's long-term plan for the Xeon and Itanium server platforms is to have a single set of platform technologies--including chipsets, motherboards, and I/O peripherals--that support both family of chips. Hewlett-Packard, which is the dominant player in the Itanium market, can't wait that long, and that is why it has grabbed many of the features that are standard on its Xeon-based ProLiant servers and is now putting them into its new Itanium-based Integrity servers.

With its support of the new Madison processors that Intel is launching this week, HP is also revamping its entry Integrity servers to include the Integrated Lights Out (iLO) service processors and their associated systems management software. These iLO features, which have been standard in Pentium and Xeon ProLiant servers for several years, will give system administrators a common set of tools that they use on ProLiant boxes running Windows and Linux and on Integrity servers running HP-UX, Linux, Windows, and even OpenVMS when it is available later this year.

There are three new Integrity servers that use the new "Madison" Itanium MP and "Fanwood" Itanium DP and LV processors. HP is also shipping a cut down development server--what we used to call a workstation, but HP has withdrawn its zx Series Itanium workstations from marketing.

The Integrity rx 1620-2 is a 1U rack-mounted server that can have one or two of the Fanwood Itaniums installed. HP has tweaked its "Pluto" zx1 Itanium chipset so it can support both 400 MHz and 533 MHz frontside buses; the 533 MHz bus offers 8.5 GB/sec of peak bandwidth, while the 400 MHz bus tops out at 6.4 GB/sec. The rx1620 can use the 1.6 GHz/3 MB L3 cache Fanwood processor with a 533 MHz frontside bus or the 1.3 GHz/3 MB cache Fanwood LV, the low-voltage, low cache variant of the new Itaniums, which has a 400 MHz frontside bus. The rx1620 can support up to 16 GB of main memory (that's eight 2 GB DIMMs) and has two PCI-X slots, each with its own PCI bus, which means you can push a lot of data through each slot. The rx 1620-2 has two empty SCSI drive bays and a bay for a DVD drive, and has dual Gigabit Ethernet ports embedded in its system board. The iLO feature cards are integrated in the server. A base machine with one Itanium processor is expected to have a street price of under $4,000.

The rx2620-2 server is a 2U, two-way rack-mounted Itanium machine. It can use the 1.3 GHz/3 MB cache Fanwood LV, the 1.6 GHz/3 MB cache Fanwood DP, and the 1.6 GHz/6 MB cache Madison processors. All of these chips support a 400 MHz frontside bus, and support up to 24 GB of main memory. The rx2620-2 has four PCI-X slots, again each with its own PCI bus, and has iLO features built in. This server also has three hot-plug SCSI disk drive bays and a bay for a DVD drive, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The entry street price for the base rx2620-2 is expected to be less than $5,000.

The biggest new box that HP will ship is the rx4640-8, which uses all three speeds of the newest Madison processors: 1.6 GHz with either 9 MB or 6 MB caches or 1.5 GHz with a 4 MB cache. In all cases, these processors have a 400 MHz frontside bus. The rx4640-8 can support up to 32 of HP's 4 GB DIMMs, HP's first machine to use such dense memory. This server also has two Gigabit Ethernet ports and dual Ultra320 SCSI controllers built in. The rx4640-8 is a 4U server with six PCI-X slots and two hot-plug SCSI disk bays, plus a DVD bay. A base rx4640-8 will cost less than $15,000, and also includes the iLO features. It will also support the "Hondo" mx2 dual Madison processor modules that HP manufactures for itself since Intel has not yet got dual-core Itaniums to market.

HP says that the three new servers will begin shipping in December, and that they will all support HP-UX 11i v2, Linux (Red Hat 3 AS and SuSE 9), Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition, and OpenVMS v8.2.

Brian Cox, product manager for HP's Business Critical Servers unit, says that the updated Madison processors will be rolled into the remainder of the Integrity line--including the four socket rx5670, the eight-socket rx7620-16, the 16-socket rx8620-32, and the 64-socket Superdome servers--in early 2005. These machines can accept Madison Itaniums or the dual Madison modules.