HP intros "Best Mission-Critical Platform"
April 27, 2010
Hewlett-Packard introduces "The World's Best Mission Critical Platform" today in a series of Web chats, online video shorts and specification sheets, all designed to let prospects like 3000 migrators "Witness" the rollout of Superdome 2.
The Superdome line, first introduced more than a decade ago, will be rejuvenated with the latest Intel 9300 Tukwila processors, plus innovations in the massive server's FlexFabric Matrix designs that tie together processors, storage and networking. HP's new Executive VP of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking David Donateli, said that the vendor's enterprise solutions benefit from HP's classic one-stop mantra.
"We're the only company out there that designs its own networking, storage and servers," Donateli said in a Flash presentation that's being hosted today. HP has a registration page to enable access to the presentations, timed to coincide with this week's Realise the Future HP [email protected] 2010 event in Frankfurt.
The online show is set to begin at 11 AM EDT, while an online chat is starting up at 10 AM. Both can be accessed through the Witness event's Resource Center. Engineer Wendy Wienhardt of the Enterprise Systems Lab (above) conducts a video tour of the massive box at the site, plus shows off an old-school-style interface (left) that lets administrators inspect and troubleshoot Superdome 2 partitions that are not even online.
The Superdome remains an enterprise solution for the top end of HP's customer line, and the Witness event is pitched at the Global 400-style customer who is concerned with datacenter sprawl: the proliferation of multiple silos of networking, storage and processing. HP wants to consolidate and integrate all of that for the big-scale shops, and perhaps for the companies that aspire to create a datacenter large enough to need to worry about sprawl.
The two 9300 processors are mounted in blade enclosures, a first for Superdome and a design aimed at reducing the cost of the systems by as much as 40 percent. HP calls this design "scale up Unix" because of its blade foundation. Even though the Tukwila chips are in systems that won't ship until the second half of 2010, they've been engineered in sockets to accept two additional generations of processors. Intel has announced it has two more generations of this Itanium chip in the planning and design stages, so the design will enable Superdome 2 to have a long lifespan as Itanium continues to roll forward.