The Itanium 9300 processor was announced on February 8, 2010. On April 27, HP announced the new HP Integrity servers with the Itanium 9300 processors. I had the chance to hit the road and introduce this server to customers in five cities over a couple of weeks.
Before I get going, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m in HP’s Business Critical Systems marketing group, and have been working on virtualization, HP-UX, and HP Integrity servers for the last eight years. While I get to participate in the development cycle for HP offerings, I also have the opportunity to meet with customers around the world and deliver internal HP training – recently, around the new HP Integrity servers. I also participate in the Musings on Mission Critical Computing blog.
HP could have just put this newer, more powerful processor, along with faster memory, the latest I/O options, and a faster bus into the same servers that were previously available. However, we didn’t, and that is what caught the interest of the customers that I had a chance to speak with.
In many of the cities, I had a new HP Integrity Blade Server to demonstrate these differences. The new BL860c i2 is the basic building block for the new Integrity Blades. A single BL860c i2 has two Itanium 9300 processors, 24 DDR3 DIMM slots, two hard drives, 4×10Gb Virtual Connect Flex-10 network connections and more. Just looking at this single blade, customers tend to like the many memory slots, something that is needed as systems are virtualized and memory becomes a constraining factor. Most customers also can’t imagine swamping the 4 x 10Gb network ports, even if they are dividing them into 16 virtual network connections to run a lot of virtual machines. Finally, the idea that these systems are socket compatible with the multiple generations of Itanium processors, and offer tool-free upgrades, just makes the new HP Integrity Blades even more interesting on their own.
However, that isn’t the biggest change. Instead of having separate blade servers in the two- and four-socket space, HP has used the Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) on the Itanium 9300 processor to make the BL860c i2 a modular building block. If you connect two BL860c i2 servers, you get a four socket, 48 DIMM, four hard-drive, 8 x 10 GB network connection BL870c i2. And if you connect four BL860c i2 servers, you get a BL890c i2 with four times the capabilities - the first eight-socket UNIX blade server in the industry. The Blade Link connector, which sits across the front of the blades, physically links the QPI connections on the separate blades together to make it a single system. Of course, since the systems are modular, you can break the BL890c i2 into two BL870c i2 servers with different Blade Link connectors, or of course, four BL860c i2 blade servers. This really caught many people’s attention, since it changes how they size, purchase, and maintain their HP Integrity servers.
First, from a sizing perspective, customers can size for the workload they expect today. If they need to increase (or decrease) the size of the server, they can easily do so by changing the Blade Link connectors, reboot the system, and voila - right sized for a changing workload. It means that sizing changes are easy, and trying to predict the workload size years in advance is less critical. Basically, some of the resizing capabilities that are appreciated in virtual environments are available with the physical blade servers.
From a purchasing perspective, while customers can still purchase individual servers with different capacities, for large installations they also have the option of just stocking a single blade and then creating different sized servers, as required, using the Blade Link connector.
And finally, having one standard blade, sharing the common c3000 and c7000 HP BladeSystem chassis as Xeon-based blades reduces the number of maintenance and management processes - something that helps long after the price for the initial purchase has been paid.
In addition to the HP Integrity Blades, HP announced that there would be a new Superdome 2, a rack-mount rx2800 i2, and a BladeSystem Matrix with HP-UX bundle available later this year. I won’t cover them here, but the orchestration capabilities [Demo] in HP BladeSystem Matrix with HP-UX go particularly well with the new HP Integrity blades. In fact, one customer had me come back to that one topic four times on the same call. However, for space considerations, I won’t cover them in detail in this post.
These are just some of the things that customers found exciting about the new HP Integrity Blade servers. Many of customers were expecting the new servers to have the Itanium 9300 processor, faster memory, and faster I/O. What was exciting for them was that HP went beyond just the latest hardware, and brought some innovation to help solve other customer problems, such as sizing, purchasing complexity, and back-end maintenance.
Have you seen the way HP has integrated the Itanium 9300 processors into a new line of servers? If so, what do you think? I know that I’m excited, but what about you?
