Wednesday, November 15, 2006

HP Doubles Processing Power of Itanium-Based Systems

Hewlett-Packard Co. is rolling out new hardware, software and services designed to push forward the company's Adaptive Enterprise utility computing strategy.

At the company's ENSA@Work conference in Munich, Germany, HP officials on Wednesday are unveiling a new module that will double the processing power of its Itanium-based Integrity systems. The new mx2 module will feature two 64-bit Itanium 2 processors on a single module, said Mark Hudson, vice president of marketing for HP's Enterprise Storage and Servers group.

IT administrators will be able to replace existing single-processor modules in their current four- to 128-way systems with the mx2, Hudson said. That will turn a customer's 128-way Superdome into a 256-processor server without having to buy a new system.

In addition, the Palo Alto, Calif., company is introducing its StorageWorks Reference Information Storage System, or RISS, that Hudson said helps enterprises deal with the growing amount of data that needs to be stored on a long-term basis, particularly in light of such federal regulations as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA medical privacy requirementThe solution, in part the result of HP's acquisition last year of Persist Technologies Inc., also makes indexing, searching and retrieval of the data easier. HP's storage grid architecture makes each of those tasks a "smart cell," complete with its own hardware, storage, search engine and retrieval capabilities. The solution also includes accompanying services, and will be followed in the future with a developer tool kit, HP officials said.

Also in Munich, HP introduced new information lifecycle management services, including Business Requirement Analysis to assess everything from an enterprise's regulatory compliance to archiving requirements and policies, and Electronic Vaulting Service to help businesses design and create backup capabilities either on-site or hosted by HP.

In addition, the company is introducing to its NonStop line of high-availability systems the same mission-critical services that it has in its other servers. Prior to this, these systems—holdovers from the Compaq Computer Corp. acquisition—were managed by propriety services designed specifically for the NonStop systems.

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