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For companies running HP’s HP-UX and OpenVMS, making the migration from a rack-mount to an HP Integrity server blade environment is a compelling part of an overall strategy to reduce infrastructure costs.
Adding rack servers, especially when integrating with LANs and SANs, often means adding thousands of repetitive parts including cables, adapters and supporting switches. According to research firm IDC in a June 2006 white paper titled, “Forecasting Total Cost of Ownership for Initial Deployments of Blade Servers”*, these are costs that are often unaccounted for.
HP’s BladeSystem c-Class servers:
- Are usually less expensive to acquire and maintain
- Have very similar performance ranges
- Are easier and quicker to deploy and change
- Offer power, power cable and cooling savings of up to 60 percent, and up to 40 percent in reduced electricity consumption
The HP Integrity server blade, as part of HP’s BladeSystem family, does all that and more – in a small, efficient package that delivers enterprise-size consolidation power.
“We’ve given customers the capability of taking mission-critical HP-UX and OpenVMS applications and moving them to the economics of the HP BladeSystem c-Class,” says HP Product Manager Steve Bellinghausen. “As their infrastructure needs to be expanded, consolidated or replaced as a result of age, they now have a new form factor, a new infrastructure to choose from so they can enjoy the economics of the BladeSystem without having to change out their operating system. It’s the same tools, the same UNIX® … that entire ecosystem is transferrable to the HP BladeSystem”.
Blade tasks
The HP Integrity BL860c Server Blade, featuring dual-core Intel® Itanium® processors, is well-suited to handling a range of tasks including:
- Consolidation of older applications
- Java™ stacking
- Replicated computing
“Wherever you were looking at a four-processor server for a UNIX® deployment, now you can deploy those workloads on HP Integrity server blades, because they provide four processors in two sockets, which is essentially the same performance range as we previously had on the HP Integrity rx4640 with four processors and four sockets,” explains Markus Berber, HP’s Integrity Blades Strategist.
Blades at work
A large Asian airline, for example, is in the process of deploying more than 20 HP Integrity server blades for HP-UX workload consolidation, and an Italian high-performance computing centre also has invested in a Linux® cluster deployment of more than 300 Intel® Xeon®-based ProLiant blades and over 60 HP Integrity server blades.
Closer to home, a large Canadian telecommunications provider has deployed more than 40 HP Integrity server blades as part of an upgrade to the company’s billing and integrated customer management system; and a major U.S. government department will deploy up to 130 blades attached to two high-end HP Integrity-backed database servers for information-sharing and other applications.
“If you ever thought you couldn’t do it on blades, think again,” Berber advises. “The HP Integrity server blade offers the same stability and assurance and performance traditionally associated with UNIX.”
* IDC white paper sponsored by HP, “Forecasting Total Cost of Ownership for Initial Deployments of Server Blades,” Doc. #202092, June 2006. |
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