The greater server capacity is a result of HP's new chipset that can increase the HP Integrity server's ability to handle complex workloads by up to 30 percent. The rollout follows HP's recent announcement of increased support for HP Integrity servers.

"The global market opportunity for the replacement of RISC and CISC-based server environments in existence today is nearly a $24 billion proposition, and one that vendors are attacking fiercely”, stated Andrew Butler, vice president and distinguished analyst, Gartner. "Vendors that can approach customers with enhanced system capabilities that speak to today's need for sophisticated virtualization, management tools and capacity boosts are taking a step in the right direction."

HP rounded out the offering with solutions for greater HP-UX 11i disaster-tolerance and security capabilities, new configuration options for HP Integrity NonStop servers and new HP-UX 11i management tools to simplify data center operations.

"With a growing, highly satisfied customer base and an ecosystem of more than 7400 applications, HP Integrity server solutions are meeting the imperatives of demanding, mission-critical environments”, stated Rich Marcello, senior vice president and general manager, Business Critical Servers, HP. "Today's announcement is another step towards helping customers achieve their IT requirements of driving down the total cost of ownership while increasing return on IT investment.”

The HP-UX 11i reference architectures and toolkits for HP VSE enable customers to bring virtualization projects on-line in less than half the time when using software from BEA, Oracle, SAP and IBM. For example, a VSE implementation with BEA WebLogic that could otherwise take anywhere from 17 to 34 weeks to complete can now be fully planned, designed and deployed in four to seven weeks.

The next-generation chipset for Integrity servers delivers significant enhancements to performance and availability. The chipset enables customers to get 30 percent more work done across multiple workloads, while using the same number of Intel Itanium 2 processors. Featured and available today in the cell-based HP Integrity rx7640, rx8640 and Superdome servers, the chipset delivers single system availability features to improve memory availability, interconnectivity and fault tolerance.

In addition, HP rolled out Global Instant Capacity for HP-UX 11i to offer customers greater flexibility in balancing workloads across multiple data centres.

HP is extending its business continuity and availability solutions by providing more disaster-tolerance offerings for HP-UX 11i customers. The capabilities include intercontinental failover of Oracle 10g environments and support of SONET, a low-cost networking option for disaster recovery. New HP Serviceguard Extensions for SAP improve the speed and simplicity of high-availability solutions for HP-UX 11i and Linux on HP Integrity servers.

For Windows, HP Competent Cluster Service and HP Cluster Extension software for HP StorageWorks EVA and XP now deliver enhanced high availability and seamless failover, in addition to new application stacking capabilities for consolidation.

Boasting stronger data protection, the HP-UX 11i Encrypted Volumes provide built-in security to protect sensitive data such as credit card numbers and health records from intrusion and theft.

HP also announced the latest addition to the HP Integrity NonStop family, the Integrity NonStop NS14000 server. The Integrity NonStop platform provides customers that run critical business applications with unprecedented levels of availability and data integrity. The NS14000 delivers the continuous availability of other Integrity NonStop offerings with new configuration options for customers with a variety of performance and scalability needs. The Integrity NonStop NS16000 server customized for the telecommunications industry requirements also is now available.

HP has broadened its capabilities to simplify management and streamline operational efficiencies in data centres, including:

• HP-UX 11i Distributed Systems Administration Utilities allow a single administrator to synchronize up to 500 instances of HP-UX 11i;
• Enhancing HP Systems Insight Manager, the industry’s only unified infrastructure management platform, now automatically discovers applications in an HP VSE;
• Multiple operating system capabilities for HP Integrity servers are strengthened by the availability of additional HP OpenVMS products.