HP Announces Integrity Enhancements

As a follow up to its Webcast with Intel and Oracle early this month, HP Monday announced some enhancements to its Integrity server line and HP-UX 11i operating environment .

HP affirmed its commitment to Integrity this week with a bevy of announcements around high availability and virtualization capabilities for the mission-critical servers.

The server line, which is positioned toward mission-critical apps, represents the next generation for HP’s Alpha Server and NonStop lines. Alpha and NonStop shops are being encouraged to migrate to Integrity, where they will find Itanium-powered HP-UX-based servers designed to meet their needs.

HP is prepared to meet these needs, as evidenced by its $1 billion investment in the processor and OS, Ute Albert, Ute Albert, worldwide marketing manager, virtual server environment at HP told ServerWatch.

Among the new enhancements are increased sever capacity and easier deployment of enterprise software within an HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE), HP’s virtualized environment.

The greater server capacity is a result of a new chipset. Developed by HP, the Integrity-specific chipset delivers a 30 percent improvement in performance, compared to Itanium 2 processors tackling similarly complex workloads. The chipset also delivers single system availability features to improve memory availability, interconnectivity, and fault tolerance.

The chip can be found in the cell-based HP Integrity rx7640, rx8640, and Superdome servers.

HP also bolstered the high availability of Integrity servers with the release of various HP-UX 11i solutions for greater disaster tolerance capabilities and security capabilities, new configuration options for Integrity NonStop servers, and new HP-UX 11i management tools to simplify data center operations.

A newly published HP-UX 11i reference architecture and toolkits for VSE are designed to speed the deployment of virtualization projects. VSE supports applications from BEA, Oracle, SAP, and IBM. In addition, HP rolled out Global Instant Capacity for HP-UX 11i to offer customers greater flexibility in balancing workloads across multiple data centers.

HP also announced two additions to the HP Integrity NonStop family &151 the Integrity NonStop NS14000 server, which boasts a variety of new configuration options, and the NS16000, its telecommunications-customized counterpart.

In the realm of security, HP will provide more disaster tolerance offerings for HP-UX 11i customers, including, intercontinental failover of Oracle 10g environments and support of SONET, and new Serviceguard Extensions for SAP. For Windows shops, HP Competent Cluster Service and HP Cluster Extension software for HP StorageWorks EVA and XP will deliver improved high-availability and failover, in addition to new application stacking capabilities for consolidation.

Finally, HP had several announcements around simplified data center management: The HP-UX 11i Distributed Systems Administration Utilities enable admins to synchronize up to 500 instances of HP-UX 11i. HP Systems Insight Manager, a unified infrastructure management platform, now automatically discovers applications in an HP VSE partition. Additional HP OpenVMS products enable multiple operating system capabilities on Integrity servers.