Itanium systems from HP have been in the marketplace for more than a year, but HP decided to re-brand its servers that use the architecture with a June 30 announcement. The processor may not ever drive MPE/iX in a native implementation — despite HP’s promises in 1998 to offer just that. But Itanium remains important to the HP 3000 customers who are looking to move away from their business operating environment and re-invest in HP’s newest architecture — a line of systems the company is betting its future upon.

The June 30 story told customers about the new Integrity servers from HP, Itanium 2-driven high-end and entry-level systems that will use the Madison version of the Itanium processors. HP reported an industry-leading benchmark for a $6.5 million Superdome implementation of the new server, and said that implementation will ship near the end of October according to HP’s report to the Transaction Processing Council (TPC). Faster high technology is the leading headline for the HP news, but it appears to be a demonstration of the company’s desire to sell its customers an affordable way to change their enterprise computing configurations. CEO Carly Fiorina said in a pre-recorded message that HP’s goal is to let customers “not only survive change, but thrive on it,” and Enterprise Systems Group VP Peter Blackmore told attendees of a Webcast that HP offers a “trilogy” of high technology, low cost and best customer experience, while claiming IBM can’t compete on cost. HP wants Itanium 2 to create “The Adaptive Enterprise, the ultimate state of fitness for IT.”

The servers themselves lie along the N-Class path that HP 3000 sites will be investing in for the rest of this year. HP is making it possible to upgrade to Integrity enterprise class servers from the PA-RISC HP 9000s in the rp5400 and rp7400 families. HP has been offering conversion kits to transform A-Class HP 3000s to the rp2400 family, and N-Class systems to the rp7400 family. From these rp7400 PA-RISC systems, customers can then convert to the Integrity systems that are driven by the 1.5 GHz Itanium Madison-generation chips. Midrange systems weren’t part of the June 30 announcement; HP plans to do another rollout of servers that will let rp7410 models, based on PA-RISC processors, be in-chassis upgradeable to the upcoming HP Integrity midrange models. An HP Integrity Superdome server comes in 16-, 32- and 64-processor configurations. A four-processor HP Integrity rx5670 and two-processor HP Integrity rx2600 entry-level servers have also been upgraded to Itanium 2 processors with 6 Mb of Level 3 cache. HP plans to introduce midrange Integrity systems with 8 and 16 processors in the fall, and an Itanium 2-based NonStop offering in 2004. HP’s still going to be rolling out more PA-RISC based HP-UX systems, based on the PA-8800 and PA-8900 processors, all through those years of Itanium releases.

Speaking of proprietary operating environments, HP spoke up about how long customers could expect to run HP-UX applications during the Webcast. Scott Stallard, senior VP of the Business Critical Systems unit of the Enterprise Systems Group, said that “our customers have shown they have different operating environments in their organization today. HP-UX is a huge market segment, and we think it’s growing, and we’ll continue to invest in it for 15, 20 or 30 years to drive on those mission critical applications for HP-UX.” Windows 2003 Datacenter drove the HP record-breaking benchmark on Integrity, however, using a SQL Server database rather than Oracle. As for HP’s other specialized environment of OpenVMS, the former Compaq customers heard that their Integrity and the Itanium 2 implementation is set to arrive next year. Stallard said that OpenVMS “has a very loyal, mission-critical following,” a description that HP 3000 customers will remember being used on them during the late 1990s when HP strategy briefings mentioned the MPE environment. About half of the VMS customers haven’t made the migration to OpenVMS, a shift that one MPE developer says is more taxing that moving from MPE to HP-UX. But HP wants its customers who are willing to “evolve”— the vendor doesn’t use the word migrate anymore — to know that its Itanium offerings “are ready for prime time now.”