HP to develop unified UNIX-x86 platform
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) has announced a project that aims to take the future of mission-critical computing a notch up with a development roadmap.
The project ‘Odyssey’ will unify UNIX and x86 serverarchitectures to bring a higher level of availability and performance, and uncompromising client choice in a single platform, stated HP.
Organizations are challenged with increasingly stringent service-level agreements for their most demanding workloads, along with the pressure to be more efficient with their IT budgets and resources. They need the availability and resilience of UNIX-based platforms along with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of industry-standard platforms, HP noted.
Using advanced technology across a common, modular HP BladeSystem architecture, HP is developing platforms to enable clients to choose the best environment aligned to their organizations’ needs without compromise, helping ensure investment protection for the long term.
HP’s development roadmap includes ongoing innovations to HP Integrity servers, HP NonStop systems and the HP-UX and OpenVMS OS. The roadmap also includes delivering blades with Intel Xeon processors for the HP Superdome 2 enclosure (code name ‘DragonHawk’) and the scalable c-Class blade enclosures (code named ‘HydraLynx’), while fortifying Windows and Linux environments with innovations from HP-UX within the next two years.
With the availability of ‘DragonHawk,’ clients will be able to run mission-critical workloads on HP-UX on Intel Itanium-based blades while simultaneously running workloads on Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon-based blades in the same Superdome 2 enclosure, stated the company.
“Clients have been asking us to expand the mission-critical experience that is delivered today with HP-UX on Integrity to an x86-based infrastructure,” indicated Martin Fink, SVP and GM, business critical systems, HP. “HP plans to transform the server landscape for mission-critical computing by using the flexibility of HP BladeSystem and bringing key HP technology innovations from Integrity and HP-UX to the x86 ecosystem. Unlike the competition, HP offers an open, integrated, single platform approach.”
With this project, HP will enable clients running Linux or Windows to increase scalability with 32-socket ‘DragonHawk’ symmetrical multiprocessing x86 systems that will scale to hundreds of cores and support large, complex workloads. The systems will enable clients to deploy the smallest to the largest workloads in a dynamic, highly scalable pool of IT resources. It will also allow increased reliability and flexibility with two-, four- and eight-socket ‘HydraLynx’ scalable x86 server blades with mission-critical virtualization and availability, all packaged in the robust c-Class enclosures of HP BladeSystem.
In addition, the development roadmap will lead to increased availability of critical Linux applications with the HP Serviceguard solution that automatically moves application workloads between servers in the event of a failure or an on-demand request. Likewise, it will boost flexibility and availability of x86 systems with HP nPartitions technology (nPars) that provides precise partitioning of system resources across multiple or variable workloads. HP nPars is electrically isolated to eliminate failure points that allow clients to ‘scale out’ within a single, robust system.
HP stated that ‘Odyssey’ will enhance business continuity with HP Analysis Engine for x86 embedded into the system firmware. HP Analysis Engine goes beyond error logging to ensure efficient diagnoses and automatic repair of complex system errors while restoring system stability in seconds. Additionally, the system will bolster reliability and resiliency of x86 systems with fault-tolerant HP Crossbar Fabric that intelligently routes data within the system for redundancy and high availability, added HP.
It will also achieve higher levels of availability with HP Mission Critical Services that identify and resolve possible sources of downtime, the company stated.
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