HP to Invest $3 Billion in Itanium-Powered Servers
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Hewlett-Packard Co. is planning to spend $3 billion over the next three years to grow the server product line that runs on Intel Corp.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-PackardÂ introduced an entry-level rack server in India on Thursday, part of its strategy to design lower-cost servers specifically for Asian countries. Asia has high growth markets like China and India, but the needs and usage models of customers there are different from those elsewhere in the world, Paul Miller, HPâs vice president of marketing for Industry Standard Servers (ISS) and BladeSystems, told reporters in Bangalore on Thursday. A large proportion of customers in Asia, including smaller businesses, don't need all the features included with HP servers sold in other regions, said Tony Parkinson, HPâs vice president and general manager for ISS in the Asia Pacific. âCustomers in Asia want a âgood enoughâ product which is reliable, good quality, good brand, and not very expensiveâ, he said. The new server, the ProLiant DL180, is based on Dual Core and Quad-Core Xeon processors from Intel and priced from 100,000 Indian rupees, or about $2,500. HP said the servers will help Asian businesses to migrate from tower servers to rack servers, by offering the efficiency of a rack server and the economics of a tower server. Users in Asia often stuff tower servers into racks because of space constraints, but have not migrated to rack servers because of their higher costs, Miller said. Some of the features and components, included as standard on similar HP rack servers, are offered as options on the DL180 to drive down costs, said Kevin Van Mondfrans, HPâs manager of product marketing for ISS. For example, while Asian customers want basic management capabilities, they don't see a need for the more sophisticated management software typically offered on these servers, he said. Usage models also differ in Asia, according to HP. The DL180 is likely to be used as a standalone storage server in Asia, while customers in the U.S. tend to use such systems as part of a storage area network (SAN), Parkinson said. The products for Asia are being designed at an HP ProLiant design center in Taiwan. Asia is the only region the company is designing special products for, Miller said. However, some of the products for Asia may be offered later in other developing markets, such as Latin America and Russia, he said. The ProLiant ML115, introduced in March as a tower server at the cost of a desktop, was designed for Asia but eventually introduced in other parts of the world. HP will offer customers in Asia a mix of Asia-specific products and standard products, as some Asian customers, such as large enterprises, want the full-featured products, Parkinson said. He did not say how many more servers HP is designing exclusively for the region.
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SEPTEMBER 24, 2004 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Hewlett-Packard Co. has stopped selling workstations based on Intel Corp.&#39;s Itanium 2 microprocessor, a company spokeswoman confirmed today.
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Hewlett-Packard Co. will release the final processor upgrade for its AlphaServer line of Unix servers on Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Oracle will soon begin certification of its database software to run on Itanium 2 computing processor platforms. Oracle joined with officials of the Itanium Solutions Alliance (ISA) in making the announcement Monday at the first ever Itanium Solutions Summit in San Francisco. The move is a further endorsement by Oracle of the beleaguered Itanium processor family which has been slow to gain traction in the server marketplace, though it hasÂ shown some recent momentum. "This seems like an 'attaboy' announcement," said industry analyst Charles King. The Itanium microprocessor family was developed by Intel, of Santa Clara, California, and Hewlett-Packard, of Palo Alto, California, but even with the backing of these tech industry giants, relatively few software programs were initially available to run on Itanium. In announcing Oracle's support, Alliance members said Monday there are now 10,000 software applications from 2,000 independent software vendors certified on the Itanium 2 dual-core processor, code-named "Montecito," the latest iteration of Itanium introduced this summer. When ISA was founded in September 2005, it counted only 5,000 Itanium-compatible applications. Oracle, of Redwood Shores, California, is "reiterating" its support of Itanium with Monday's announcement, said Oracle spokesman Eloy Ontiveros, planning to certify the next major releases of its Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware products across various operating systems. Oracle's decision is "in keeping with our longstanding tradition of presenting customers with many choices in deployment platforms," said Prem Kumar, vice president of the Oracle's Server Technologies division. Of Oracle's support of Itanium, industry analyst Joe Clabby said, "They kind of have to." Oracle is one of the largest of HP's technology partners and HP is the biggest supporter of Itanium, said Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics of Yarmouth, Maine, citing industry reports that as many as 80 percent of the Itanium servers on the market are HP-branded servers. Oracle has made several announcements in recent years about software applications that run on Itanium-powered servers and this is just the latest effort to promote Itanium, said King, president of Pund-IT Research, of Hayward, California. "Now that Montecito has hit the market, Itanium is gaining success among HP users," King said. But he still doesn't see Itanium taking business from its main processor competitors, the Power architecture from IBM Corp., of Armonk, New York, or the Sparc from Sun Microsystems, of Santa Clara, California. However, ISA cited IDC Research data showing Itanium building momentum. Sales of Itanium-based systems generated $740 million in revenue in the second quarter, up 36.4 percent from the year ago quarter. IDC reported in February that the market for Itanium servers may reach $6.6 billion by 2009, up from $2.4 billion in 2005. Other server makers supporting Itanium 2 include Unisys, of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, FujitsuÂ of Japan, and Silicon Graphics, of Mountain View, California.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Patient customers cheer HP is about to find out just how big of a gamble this Itanium thing really was.â¦
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Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) will begin selling managed IT and communications services next year to small and medium-size businesses in three continents, offering Internet access, servers, voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) and help desk calls at fixed monthly rates, an HP official said.
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Intel and Hewlett-Packard will end their 10-year long development partnership for Itanium server chips, according to a report from Reuters.
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Sun also on life support, apparently Despite HP's healthy rise in Itanium server sales, IBM think its major rival and Intel will have to give up on the processor in the near future due to basic economics.â¦
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Hewlett-Packard Co. has updated and expanded its Itanium-based Integrity server line by adding new low-end models, processor upgrades and better virtualization support.
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Printer and PC maker Hewlett-Packard  Co. HPQ.N will stop offering desktop workstations based on  Intel Corp.'s INTC.O Itanium microprocessor, The Wall Street  Journal reported on its online edition.
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Hewlett-Packard is looking to jump into the lead in the growing server-blade market--at least temporarily--with its announcement Wednesday that it will integrate Brocade Communications Systems
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SAN JOSE, Calif. Intel has reached an agreement to hire hundreds of Hewlett-Packard engineers who helped design the Itanium microprocessor.
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Hewlett-Packard has unveiled a host of upgrades to its Integrity server product line, including faster Intel Itanium 2 processors, new virtualization capabilities, and new production releases of the OpenVMS and Linux operating systems.
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(InfoWorld) - Hewlett-PackardÂ is launching two servers using Intel's new dual-core Itanium chip in a bid to gain market traction for the troubled Itanium line. HP's Integrity rx3660 server, with a base price of $10,531, and rx6600 server, which starts at $14,771, will be introduced Thursday and feature Intel's Itanium 2 "Montecito" processor. IntelÂ introduced that processorÂ in July. HP is also offering a Montecito upgrade throughout its existing Integrity line. The industry is watching to see if Montecito will improve Itanium's competitive position against IBM's Power 5 chip architecture and Sun Microsystems' Sparc. It also remains to be seen how many server vendors beyond HP will embrace Itanium. "I would describe this as a marathon," said Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing for the Business Critical Server Division of HP, in Palo Alto, California. "It takes a long time to establish a new architecture in the market. It took IBM a long time to establish Power." HP introduced its first Itanium server in 2001. But by the end of 2005, servers based on the processor accounted for less than 1 percent of the market, based on units shipped, according to research firm Gartner, and 85 percent of them were sold by HP. But by another measure, Itanium is growing. Today, close to 9,000 software applications run on Itanium, said Jenkins, up from about 100 in 2003, which gives Integrity broader appeal to enterprise customers. "Customers can't use the server until they have the applications and the application vendors don't want to invest in the applications on that chip until they see the demand for it," he said. Several important software vendors also announced Thursday their support of Integrity running Montecito, including BEA Systems, RSA Security, and Comverse Technology. "HP has been steadily adding to the Itanium portfolio," said Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata. But few other server vendors are following HP's support of Itanium, Haff added. Fujitsu Ltd. announced in August it will introduce a server running Montecito, as did Silicon Graphics. But they are "small players" relative to vendors like Dell, Sun, and IBM, which are not using Itanium. Still, Haff said, Montecito "is a nice upgrade to the Itanium." Integrity is HP's high-end server for business-critical applications. Montecito is the first Itanium design to offer hyperthreading, virtualization and multiple cores, which increase Integrity's performance. The Integrity rx6600 running Montecito performs close to 350,000 transactions per minute (tmp), more than twice the 161,000 tmp of an Integrity running an older version of Itanium, according to tests by the independentÂ Transaction Processing Performance Council. Montecito is also more cost efficient, operating at $2.24 per transaction minute, versus $3.94 on a previous Itanium chip. But skepticism remains. "$2.24 is good but they're still not the most powerful system," said John Clabby, president of the IT research firm Clabby Analytics. "Montecito is an improvement, but it's not a leader and that's what Itanium was supposed to be." The fastest processor tested by TPC is an IBM Power 5. which topped 4 million transactions per minute a with a cost per minute of $2.97, noted Clabby. HP's Jenkins downplays the significance of IBM's performance numbers, noting that most enterprises only need servers that can perform 150,000 to 300,000 transactions per minute. "Four million is a benchmark that doesn't have any relevance other than bragging rights," Jenkins said.
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roundup The firm makes over its Pentium 4 Extreme Edition and gets ready to unveil a new top-of-the-line Itanium 2 for servers.
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By Mark Boslet, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Jun. 15--Intel ignited a new round of competition with Sun Microsystems and International Business Machines today by announcing plans to bring its most advanced chip-making technology to its Itanium line of business chips for the first time.