HP has introduced its first Unix blade technology. As expected, the move means the California-based company will be able to offer its HP-UX version of Unix on its BladeSystem products.

Those servers today are available only with x86 processors - Intel's Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices' (AMD's) Opteron - and can run Linux and Windows. Adding mission-critical capabilities to its BladeSystem platform, the new Integrity BL60p blade server supports the HP-UX 11i operating system and Intel's Itanium 2 processor.

The Integrity BL60p is designed for distributed, remote sites and Unix infrastructure consolidation as it allows organisations to automate goal-based workloads across multi-operating system platforms with HP's Global Workload Manager software. The company claims the Integrity BL60p outperformed its nearest competitor, IBM's JS20, by 60 per cent on a recent benchmark and business process testing.

HP is second in the blade market to IBM, whose BladeCenter product can run Big Blue's AIX version of Unix on blades with PowerPC processor. Dell sells only Xeon-based blades, and Sun, the fourth major server company, has said it plans to re-enter the blade server market in early 2006.

The server accommodates two 'Madison 9M' Itanium chips, the current top-end model that has 9MB of onboard cache memory. A model with two 1.6GHz chips, 4GB of memory, two hard disk drives and an HP-UX licence will cost $5695. Through partitioning features available on the system, a single blade can be divided to run as many as six separate instances of HP-UX 11i v2.

'To remain competitive, customers need adaptive IT environments that increase management efficiency and security while lowering costs,' said John King, HP Enterprise Server Manager, UK&I. 'The HP BladeSystem with the Itanium 2 processor and HP-UX operating system meets these demanding workloads with the trademark simplicity and flexibility of blade solutions.'

The Integrity BL60p blade server is managed by HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) software. HP SIM is the single point of control for managing comprehensive server, storage and network solutions across various operating systems. Without compromising on performance or redundancy, the Integrity BL60p can be partitioned into running up to six separate instances of HP-UX 11i v2.

More information on the HP Integrity BL60p and other HP BladeSystem solutions is available at www.hp.com/go/integrityblades. Units are expected to ship early next year.

BIOS, Nov 02, 05 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Server