The Windows Observer--HP Completes Montecito Itanium Rollout into Integrity Servers

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Volume 3, Number 32 -- September 20, 2006

HP Completes Montecito Itanium Rollout into Integrity Servers

Published: September 20, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Hewlett-Packard recently completed the revamping of its Itanium-based Integrity server line with the rollout of new machines that employ a home-grown chipset and Intel's "Montecito" dual-core Itanium 9000 processors. The Montecito chips were announced in mid-July, and bring the Itanium processor line to more or less performance parity with other RISC chips, thanks in large part to the move to a dual-core architecture. HP has been in sore need of the Montecitos for several years to compete with IBM.

HP had already announced its chipset for the Montecitos, code-named "Arches," back in March for larger midrange and high-end servers; this chipset was given the brand name sx2000 and is employed in the rx7640 and rx8640 servers, which span up to 8 and 16 sockets, respectively. The Arches chipset is also used to create the 64-socket Superdome Integrity servers, which are the biggest boxes HP puts into the field.

The Arches servers use the new dual-core Montecito chips or the single-core Madison Itaniums, but it is hard to imagine why anyone would buy a new Arches machine equipped with the Madisons. Back in March, however, some customers that were hard-pressed for larger main memory or higher I/O bandwidth might have done so, to be sure, since the switch from the "Pinnacles" sx1000 chipset to Arches chipset--using the same Madison processors--could boost performance by as much as 30 percent. The Arches chipset supports 2 GB DDR2 DIMM main memory, which doubles the memory capacity of the machines and speeds memory access while lowering energy consumption, and next year, when HP supports 4 GB DDR2 DIMMs, the memory capacity will double again on the Arches boxes. Still, the Arches design is really balanced for the dual-core Montecito chips, which offer double the performance of the Madisons, clock for clock, and now that HP has certified these chips on the Arches machines, only customers that have the most stringent testing and certification requirements and that have not yet been able to test the Arches-Montecito combination will buy Madisons for these machines.

While HP is happy to tell customers that they can finally get Montecito chips in their Arches machines, the stars of the launch event last week are the rx3600 and rx6600, two new midrange boxes that employ the "Titan" zx2 chipset and the Montecito processors. The "Pluto" zx1 chipset was originally created for workstations and entry servers using Itanium processors. But the advent of dual-core processors means that all server makers can push the envelope with entry server chipsets and make a very cost-effective and powerful midrange box. This is precisely what IBM has done with the p5 550, which is a two socket server that uses dual-core Power5 and Power5+, and the p5 570, which can glue together up to four of these boxes with NUMA-style clustering to create a machine that spans from 2 to 16 cores. While the new rx3600 and rx6600 do not span quite as far, the overlap in performance and, as it turns out, bang for the buck is quite close from 1 to 8 cores. That is no accident, of course. That was HP's design objective.

According to Tim Danielson, worldwide product line manager for the Integrity line at HP, the company is figuring that customers are going to find the revamped Integrity line to be pretty attractive when the Titan and Arches chipsets are combined with the Montecito Itanium 9000 processors. "We think the change to Montecito will be pretty quick," says Danielson. "All of the economics really encourage the move." He says that HP has revamped the line to offer twice the performance or more at the same or lower price point as the equivalent Madison-based products.

And, significantly because HP has such a large installed base of midrange HP-UX and OpenVMS machines out there in the world, the new rx3600 and rx6600 machine will be particularly appealing. "We look at four-core and eight-core as being the sweet spot in the market," says Danielson. "And if you look at the space where the rx6600 plays, we are now the leader in performance and price/performance." He says that the rx6600 will best the equivalent IBM p5 system by 20 percent or so in terms of raw OLTP performance and do so with 40 percent better bang for the buck. Larger rx8640 machines with Montecito offer about 30 percent better value than IBM's Unix boxes, according to Danielson.

Helping that price/performance along with the rx3600 and rx6600 is the fact that HP is finally using components from the high-volume ProLiant line in the Integrity machines. The two use the same SAS disk drives and the same DDR2 memory cards, although HP does some extra testing on the cards that go into Integrities. Using common parts means HP can charge less money for an Integrity box. For the past several years, if you based a comparison of Unix servers on list prices, the Integrities did not fare so well against the IBM pSeries and p5 lines. And with Sun catching up with the dual-core UltraSparc-IV+ chips and aggressively selling its "Galaxy" Opteron machines against entry and midrange HP-UX and OpenVMS machines, HP could not charge the kinds of premiums it got away with for the past three years.

Back in July, I previewed some of the salient characteristics of the rx3600 and rx6600 machines, and the rumor mill had them pegged just about right. The rx3600 is a two-socket, 4U rack-mounted server, while the rx6600 is a four-socket, 7U rack-mounted machine. Both use the zx2 chipset, which has three components: a memory and I/O controller, an I/O adapter, and a scalable memory expander. The memory and I/O controller links the Itanium processors to the processor bus and contains a main memory and a cache memory controller. The scalable memory expander is an adjunct chip that HP created to increase both the memory bandwidth and the memory capacity of the machines that use the zx2 chipset. The I/O adapter part of the chipset is used to create the PCI, PCI-X, and PCI-Express buses in a system, which are used to link peripheral adapter cards into the processor complex. While HP could have supported Montecito chips in the zx1 chipset, the use of dual-core chips, a large L3 cache for each core (up to 12 MB), and the addition of VT hardware-assisted virtualization. HT multithreading, and Intel Cache Safe Technology (formerly known at Intel as "Pellston") really necessitated a new chipset.

The rx3600 is currently available with the 1.4 GHz/12 MB version of the Montecito chip (that's 6 MB of L3 per core), but sometime in the fourth quarter, HP will add support for the more powerful 1.6 GHz/18 MB Montecito (that's 9 MB per core, which is exactly the same clock speed and cache available on the Madison chip). The rx3600 spans from 2 GB to 96 GB of main memory, and has eight hot-swap PCI slots. It ships as of last week with PCI-X support, and will be upgraded to PCI-Express support in the first quarter of 2007, presumably with a microcode upgrade and not a motherboard swap. The system comes with an eight-port SCSI controller with RAID 1 mirroring, which is used to support HP-UX Unix and OpenVMS. Customers that want to use Windows or Linux on the boxes have to add in a SmartArray controller from the ProLiant line, which has RAID 1, 5, and 6 support. The rx3600 has two Gigabit Ethernet ports and room for eight hot-plug, 2.5-inch SAS disk drives. HP is shipping 73 GB SAS disks now in the rx3600, and will begin shipping 146 GB units in November. The rx3600 also has redundant power and fans (both swappable), and will be available as a tower server in the first quarter of 2007 for midrange customers that do not want racks. The base rx3600, which comes with a single 1.4 GHz Montecito chip and 2 GB of memory, costs $10,531.

The rx6600 server, with 7U of space, has a lot of room for expansion. This is something that midrange customers always want, because they do not like the disruption that comes from swapping boxes all the time. The rx6600 supports three different Montecito variants: the top-bin 1.6 GHz/24 MB part, as well as the 1.6 GHz/18 MB and 1.4 GHz/12 MB versions. The rx6600 supports from 2 GB to 192 GB of main memory, and has the same eight I/O slots and two Gigabit Ethernet ports used in the rx3600. It also comes with the same SCSI RAID 1 controller for HP-UX and OpenVMS and requires the same upgrade to the SmartArray controller for Windows and Linux users. However, because the chassis is much larger, the rx6600 can support up to 16 hot-swap 2.5-inch SAS drives. A base rx6600 with one 1.4 GHz Montecito chip and 2 GB of memory costs $14,771.

Both the rx3600 and the rx6600 support HP-UX 11i v2 with the September 2006 update from HP. Red Hat Linux 4 Update 3 is also supported, and support for Novell's new SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is expected in the fourth quarter. Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition can also be installed on these boxes, as can the new OpenVMS 8.3 release from HP. The good news is that applications written for OpenVMS 8.2 are automatically certified for OpenVMS 8.3. Whatever changes HP made to the new OpenVMS are transparent to applications.

In addition to launching the servers based on the Titan chipset and getting Montecito processors into the machines with the Arches chipset, HP also announced two Thursdays ago that customers can drop Montecito chips into its entry rx2620 servers and its midrange rx4640 machines, which use the older zx1 chipset. A base rx2620 costs $4,884, while a base rx4640 costs $15,614. A base rx7640, incidentally, costs $33,058, a base rx8640 costs $74,725, and a base Superdome costs $209,389. The exact feeds and speeds of these machines were not available at press time.

HP says that it will have a processor upgrade to the next generation of the Itanium processors--the "Montvale" kicker to Montecito--about a year from now. Montvale is expected to have a faster front side bus, even larger caches, and higher clock speeds thanks to improvements in the 90 nanometer chip technologies used to make the Montecito chip. Montecito supports a 400 MHz or 533 MHz front side bus, and Montvale is expected to get a 667 MHz bus. Montecito was originally supposed to have a 667 MHz bus and clock close to 2 GHz, but for some reason Intel backed off on the speed.