HP Doubles Down, Again

HP Monday gave its x86 server lineup a fuel injection of Intel’s latest dual-core technology — the Intel Xeon processor DP.

ProLiant customers can now buy their servers with dual-core Xeon.

The first servers to see the new processors will be the 2-processor ProLiant DL380 and the 4-processor ProLiant ML570 and ProLiant DL580. HP plans to expand its ProLiant portfolio with additional dual-core Intel Xeon processor and Intel Xeon processor 7000 sequences as they become available in volume.

HP is claiming a 30 percent to 50 percent performance enhancement for servers containing the dual-core chip, Colin Lacey, director of platform marketing, Industry Standard Servers at HP, told ServerWatch.

HP anticipates 2006 will be the beginning of a “dual-core world,” Lacey said. Vendors, he noted, are revising business models and pricing with this as the assumption. HP, already no stranger to dual core, has been selling ProLiant servers powered by dual-core Opteron chips since April.

The DL380, which HP bills as “the world’s best-selling server,” was recently outfitted with Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) technology. It features eight universal small form-factor hot-plug drives. The new dual-core Intel Xeon processors will first be available on the U320 SCSI models and appear on SAS models as the processors become more readily available.

The 4-way DL580, comes in a 4U chassis and features front-accessible hot-plug RAID memory and support for up to 64 GB of memory. The dual-core chip can be swapped into existing models, although Lacey noted that, “real customers very rarely swap out processors. Once they’re up and running in a production environment, the goal is too touch as little as possible.”

Likewise, the ML570 can be modified without a forklift upgrade. The 4-way server also features hot-plug RAID memory and internal expansion capabilities — support for up to 3 terabytes of internal storage, 10 PCI slots, and 64 GB of memory.

The dual-core HP ProLiant DL380, DL580, and ML570 are expected to be available in November, with limited availability for the first six to eight weeks, Lacey said. The DL380 is priced from $4,200, the DL580, from $7,000, and the ML570 from $6,000.