* Virtage virtualization technology
Hitachi this week rolled out a new blade server system with built-in virtualization and symmetrical multiprocessing capability.
The company says that the Virtage virtualization technology and its SMP interconnect features are ideal for companies running business-critical online transaction processing, CRM and database applications.
Hitachi’s BladeSymphony is capable of intermixing Intel Xeon and Itanium based blades in the same 10U high chassis. Each BladeSymphony chassis can hold as many as eight hot-swappable server blades.
BladeSymphony uses the Virtage platform to create logical and physical partitions on Windows or Red Hat Linux machines. Virtage is tightly integrated with Intel’s Vanderpool technology. It allows Itanium processors to be aggregated into larger SMP environments or for a single physical processor to be divided into a number of virtual machines.
Virtage is an embedded virtualization product that resides on BladeSymphony Itanium blades. Those blade servers are based on Intel Itanium 2 9000 Series processors. According to Hitachi, BladeSymphony with Virtage is available in more eight-processor (16-way) SMP configurations than any other blade server on the market.
The backplane of the BladeSymphony chassis uses an SMP architecture to enable multiple blades to interconnect and act as a single system in one chassis. Offered in two-processor (four-way) Itanium processor blades, BladeSymphony can be scaled up and out to offer up to two eight-processor (16-way) servers in a single chassis, thus reducing footprint and power consumption while increasing utilization.
BladeSymphony was first introduced in the United States in November of last year.
Virtage is expected to be available in January 2007 as an optional BladeSymphony component.
