HP takes aim at server market with Itanium a keystone

While many in the industry have been writing off HP lately, the maker of expensive printer ink says that it is about to make a comeback, but has made Itanium  part of its cunning plan.

At the unveiling of Odyssey, a project ” to redefine the future of mission-critical computing”, HP said it wanted to transform the server market.

Senior Vice-President and General Manager, Business Critical Systems, HP, Martin Fink told All Africa that HP’s plan is more cunning than a distributed network of foxes wired up in a supercomputer of cunning.

HP has in its hands a roadmap which annex UNIX and x86 server architectures to bring industry-leading availability, increased performance, cure cancer and put everything in a single platform.

Fink said that these days organizations were challenged with increasingly tough service-level agreements and all sorts of terrible pressure to be efficient with their IT budgets.

HP reasons that in a perfect world they would have the availability and resilience of UNIX-based platforms along with the familiarity and cost-efficiency of x86.

So HP is coming up with a development roadmap includes ongoing innovations to HP Integrity servers, HP nonstop systems and the HP-UX and OpenVMS operating systems.

The roadmap also includes delivering blades with Intel Xeon processors for the HP Superdome 2 enclosure and the scalable c-Class blade enclosures , while fortifying Windows and Linux environments with innovations from HP-UX within the next two years, Fink said.

After HP released “DragonHawk,” its customers have been asking HP to expand the mission-critical experience that is delivered today with HP-UX on Integrity to an x86-based infrastructure.

He touted project Odyssey as something that HP partners would really want because it offered a “Intel’s continued innovation with a multigenerational Itanium processor roadmap”, combined with existing and future mission-critical capabilities of Intel Xeon processors, allow HP and Intel to provide customers with greater flexibility and choice.

Together with HP, he said that Intel would be able to give customers the ability to do mission-critical computing on their terms.