By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
May 5, 2010

As part of its Converged Infrastructure initiative, HP announced on Wednesday the availability of the second iteration of its Superdome line, which adds “mission-criticality” functions to the mix of hardware and capabilities often found in its first-generation x86 server offering.

The Superdome 2, curiously priced at a 40% lower price point compared to its predecessor, puts a deeper emphasis on data center uptime, according to HP executives. “Companies’ tolerance for downtime has been reduced to zero,” explained Anthony Agustin, ESS manager of the enterprise server and storage technology solutions group at HP Philippines. “Just imagine the challenges of running the system 24/7.”

Agustin said the Superdome 2 removes the silo of various enterprise systems—such as storage, server, network, and management software—and evolves it into shared services through HP’s Converged Infrastructure that is deployed as a utility model.

In today’s business environment, the IT solutions company said firms are coming down with a two-fold issue that needs to be addressed simultaneously: the need to speedily respond to changes in business requirements, and the cost of operating the IT department.

“What’s lacking in the previous version is ‘mission-criticality’, because now, businesses can’t afford to lose high availability of servers,” remarked Joel Josol, solution architect for enterprise server, storage, and networks, HP Philippines.

The Superdome 2, Josol said, is the “epitome” of mission criticality, adding that Philippine banks with high systems availability are running on HP hardware. “Mission-critical systems automatically entail costs. Now, we are reducing the cost significantly,” he added.

“Blading” Everything
Central to the Superdome 2 offering is HP’s revolutionary blade server technology, which stems from a pact made by the company three years ago to “blade everything.” Superdome 2’s blade servers are one of the most scalable in the market, which allows for up to 128 cores to be installed in just one rack.

“Most server vendors can only accommodate up to 32 cores in one rack,” Agustin remarked. HP’s blade servers allow for maximum scalability through what is called as “blade-link” technology, which combines separate blade servers to form one new server with multiple cores.

“[Traditionally], customers buy big boxes upfront even if the resources are not yet needed,” Josol remarked. “With HP’s blade servers the investment is incremental and proportional.”

And because HP’s new rack has a dynamic number of slots, IT administrators can determine which slots are allotted for servers and I/O slots, which tend to change depending on the intended purpose. “Batch jobs are often I/O intensive, so [users] have the option to increase the number of slots for the I/O,” Josol explained.

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