HP Preps Server Announcements for January 18

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard is putting the finishing touches on a set of server announcements that the company will make as part of a broader dog and pony show hosted by HP's chairman and CEO, Carly Fiorina. The event, called Enterprise Computing Evolved, will also have Ann Livermore, who heads up HP's Technology Solutions Group, and Rich Marcello, general manager of HP's Business Critical Systems unit, on hand.

The word on the street is that HP's business partners will be briefed on January 11 on what HP's new Itanium-based Integrity servers will look like, as well as on other product announcements. HP is said to be planning to roll out the new 1.6 GHz/9 MB cache "Madison" processors into its rx and Superdome servers, which today support HP-UX, Windows, and Linux. Specifically, HP is expected to roll out new midrange and high-end servers with the new Madison chips and quite possibly with a new set of chipsets to back them up.

It also seems likely that HP, which is now far behind rival IBM's Power5 chips in terms of raw performance, will announce new "Hondo" dual Madison processor modules while at the same time downplaying the need to catch IBM in the race for the most scalability in a single system on the TPC-C and other benchmark tests. IBM's 64-way Power5-based eServer p5 595 servers, which support AIX and Linux, have just broken through the 3 million transactions per minute (TPM) performance barrier on the TPC-C online transaction benchmark, and HP's Superdomes, even using the 1.6 GHz/9 MB cache Madisons and with Hondo modules that allow the Superdome to scale to 128 physical processors in a single system image, can probably just break the around 1.5 million TPM because it has to scale back the clock speed on the chips in the Hondo modules so it can cram two of the chips on one module, which in turn plugs into a single Madison socket in the Superdome server. HP may shift the argument away from raw peak performance and toward price/performance and the upper limits of scalability that are needed by real-world customers, not benchmark tests.

As is typical at HP announcements, Fiorina and Livermore are expected to talk up HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy, a term that describes the company's attempt to transform itself as a vendor of IT solutions and services that allow companies to be more flexible as markets and business conditions change. Livermore is, in fact, hosting a Web chat on Adaptive Enterprise.

Marcello is probably not going to be just talking about enhancements to the Integrity servers. It seems likely that HP will talk about OpenVMS, too. Compaq started working on the OpenVMS port to Itanium before it was acquired by HP, and HP has been working on it since then. The effort of porting OpenVMS from the Alpha chip to the Itanium chip has taken more than three and a half years. OpenVMS 8.1, the beta test release, was being put through the paces last year, and OpenVMS 8.2, the production release for Itanium, was expected to be delivered sometime in the second half of 2004. That obviously didn't happen, and it has hurt HP's sales in the past two quarters. If HP wants to boost its Integrity server sales to fill in a gap caused by imploding AlphaServer sales, it needs to get the vast OpenVMS base excited about moving to OpenVMS 8.2 on Integrity servers, and it needs to announce OpenVMS 8.2 and a slew of ready-to-rock VMS applications next week. Whether or not HP does this remains to be seen, but the odds favor it. OpenVMS 8.2 will run on both AlphaServer and Integrity machines, so companies will be able to move to the new software first and new hardware later if they choose a two-step approach.

The interesting thing about OpenVMS will be seeing if the fastest Integrity servers using the Madison 9 MB chips will be able to beat the AlphaServers using the Alpha EV7z chips when it comes to performance on OpenVMS workloads. Last August, HP announced the last of the Alpha chips, the EV7z, which is a deep sort through the chip bins to find parts that run a little faster than the EV7s. In the 64-way "Marvel" GS1280 AlphaServers, HP has bumped up the clock speed to 1.3 GHz, while in the four-way EV47 and eight-way GS80 servers, the clock speed on the Alpha chip has been increased to 1.15 GHz. HP had already been shipping the 1.15 GHz parts in the GS1280s. To try to keep AlphaServer revenue streams moving, HP in August also chopped processor and memory prices by as much as 40 percent. But this may not have been enough to boost demand for AlphaServers with improved Integrity machines and OpenVMS around the corner.

As part of the January 18 announcements, HP is also expected to announce updated virtual partitioning capabilities for the Integrity server line and a pay-per-use utility pricing model for Integrity machines running Windows. HP has been offering utility pricing on HP 9000 and Integrity servers running its HP-UX variant for years.