HP upgrades Integrity servers, Superdome system, adds another piece to data center puzzle

HP on Monday put some more meat on its "Converged Infrastructure" architecture with an overhaul of its Integrity and Superdome systems, which run on Intel's Itanium platform, a refresh of its HP-UX operating system to include orchestration and other key features and services to ride shotgun with the effort.

In a nutshell, HP is updating its Integrity server line, which hasn't been significantly refreshed for about 7 years. Intel's quad-core "Tukwila" chips are being used to make the Integrity line more modular. The new portfolio of blades play a key role in what HP calls its first mission critical Converged Infrastructure portfolio. Specifically, these systems can add up to 100 percent application availability, says HP.

Lorraine Bartlett, vice president of marketing, strategy & operations for business critical systems at HP, said the plan is to create a common blade architecture that fits together seamlessly in a data center.

There's a big battle between vendors like Cisco Systems, HP and IBM, to win over next-gen data center buildouts. HP's data center vision relies heavily on virtualization and orchestration applications from the Opsware acquisition a few years ago. Generally speaking, HP's Converged Architecture breaks down the data center into computing resource pools. HP Converged Architecture vision looks like this:

In that equation above, HP sees the Integrity line-up feeding into the infrastructure with a unified blade server approach. HP has been building out various pieces---such as its networking unit---to plug into the Converged Infrastructure vision.

Simply put, many vendors are wrapping their IT stacks in unified data center visions. The mission is simple: Grab more wallet share.

Among the moving parts:

• HP Integrity Superdome 2 features better system resiliency and routes data between blades and I/O ports with redundancy.
• HP Integrity server blades will go from two sockets to eight sockets. HP has a technology it calls Blade Link to combine two, four and eight socket systems. ProLiant and StorageWorks blades also fit in the same enclosure as Integrity servers.
• New HP Integrity rack mount servers that will plug into existing environments.
• Software such as HP-UX 11i v3 with management features such as the BladeSystem Matrix, which allows users to provision server, software, storage and networking infrastructure easily.

• To implement its vision, HP created AllianceOne, a partner program that allows partners to integrate servers, storage and networking gear.