Well the day has arrived, the Itanium 9300 processor was announced in February, and today, HP is announcing the new HP Integrity servers.
HP could have just thrown a faster processor, DDR 3 memory, and a new I/O into our existing rack mount servers. But HP has decided to do something just a little different.
HP has decided to bring mission critical systems to a bladed environment, providing customers with a modular, flexible server. Utilising the c3000 and c7000 chassis, HP can provide 2, 4, and 8 socket blades. These blades are modular. The base unit is a 2 socket, BL860c i2. Two of them linked together with our scalable BladeLink, becomes a 4 socket, BL870c i2. Four BL860c i2 linked together becomes an 8 socket BL890c i2. This not only provides linear socket growth, but linear, memory growth, linear hard drive growth, and linear I/O growth.
dataplex are very excited about these blades, since they provide modularity and flexibility without requiring an investment in a fairly large system. And yet, they still provide scaling. For instance, you can put 2 BL890c i2 servers in a single 10 U, c7000 chassis. This provides 64 cores, 768 Gb of memory in 192 DIMM slots, 16 hard drives, and 32 Virtual Connect Flex-10 connections.
Finally, HP has also announced a small rack mount server for those customers who don't need larger, more flexible servers - the rx2800 i2.
Some pictures straight from HP Technology @ Work:
