HP Aims Midrange Servers At Application Consolidation

Computerworld - Hewlett-Packard Co. is shoring up its midrange Unix server family with a new eight-way system featuring technologies migrated from its high-end Superdome server.

The HP rp7410 system being introduced this week is positioned as a server consolidation system and as an engine for running e-commerce, service provider, business intelligence and enterprise resource planning applications.

The server is based on HP's PA 8700 processor and features the same high-performance crossbar switching and cell-based architecture found in the Superdome system.

Though the rp7410 is much smaller than the Superdome, it performs about 100,000 transactions per minute, which makes it a powerful box in most situations, said Jonathan Eunice, an analyst at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata Inc.

"It's midrange only in comparison [to the Superdome]. . . . This would have been a pretty fabulous high-end box a few years ago," he said.

A key feature of the rp7410 is its support for a range of high-availability technologies, said Mark Hudson, an HP vice president.

For instance, technologies such as self-healing caches, clustering and processor fail-over allow the server to continue operating through major failures and system errors, Hudson said.

With the rp7410, HP is also introducing dynamic virtual partitioning and hard partitioning capabilities in its midrange lineup. Initially, only hard partitions will be supported, but later this year, HP plans to introduce support for virtual partitions that allow users to run up to eight separate applications, each with its own copy of the operating system, in the same box.

Such capabilities are crucial for users looking to consolidate multiple applications on large servers, said Sarang Ghatpande, an analyst at D.H. Brown Associates Inc. in Port Chester, N.Y.

An entry-level rp7410 system with two processors and 2GB of memory costs $69,000.

AT A GLANCE

HP rp7410 Features Up to eight PA 8700 CPUs at 650 MHz and 750 MHz Up to 64GB memory (later this year) Up to two hard partitions Up to eight virtual partitions (available later this year)