* HP improves hardware, operating systems for Integrity servers
HP last week relied heavily on its Itanium roadmap as it unveiled HP Integrity servers and updated OpenVMS to run on Itanium processors.
HP is adding Itanium 2 processors with up to 9M bytes of cache to its mid-range and high-end Integrity servers. The company also announced new releases of OpenVMS v8.2 and SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 for the Integrity servers. Plus, HP added virtualization, workload manager, disaster recovery and secure resource partitioning capabilities to its HP-UX operating system.
HP’s Integrity servers now run HP-UX 11i v2, Windows Server 2003, OpenVMS and Linux. Upgrading the processors on Integrity servers increases performance by 25% over servers that use the Itanium 2 with 6M bytes of cache, according to company claims. Users can upgrade their current boxes with the new processor and intermix it with the old.
OpenVMS, a platform many companies still deploy, is now officially available on HP Integrity servers. OpenVMS v8.2 can also run on HP AlphaServer platforms and can support mixed clusters of HP Integrity servers and AlphaServer systems.
HP has also enhanced its Virtual Server Environment, which lets users optimize server resource utilization. The company is introducing a pay-per-use program for Windows, which lets users pay only for those virtual instances it uses. HP has added workload manager capability to HP-UX 11i and Linux, which allows a customer to control and modify a VSE environment over the Web.
The company has added secure partitions to HP-UX 11i, allowing multiple applications to run on the server. And, finally, HP has expanded the disaster recovery and availability characteristics of HP-UX 11i; HP Metroclusters can now exist over a 250-kilometer area and Continentalclusters can now have a single failover site for multiple primary sites.
HP Integrity Servers running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 can now support twice as many processors, at 16. This version of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server uses the 2.6 Linux kernel; Red Hat is expected to release a version of its Linux distribution for the 2.6 kernel as early as next week.
The company says it also intends to introduce Itanium-based NonStop servers in mid-2005.
