New Energy-Efficient HP Servers, Workstations Power Up Performance

November 14, 2006; 04:54 AM
HP (NYSE:HPQ) (Nasdaq:HPQ) today introduced new server and workstation systems designed to maintain power efficiency while meeting the needs of high-throughput, data-intensive applications.

The new platforms, based on the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® 5300 series processors, include HP ProLiant servers, HP BladeSystem server blades and HP Workstations and can improve certain enterprise application performance by 48 percent.(1)

HP additionally introduced the HP ProLiant DL320s server, a high-capacity, low-cost, industry-standard server designed specifically for data-rich applications.

“Today’s announcement is yet more proof of HP’s time-to-market leadership as we offer customers the latest in processor innovation,” said Paul Miller, vice president, marketing, Industry Standard Servers and BladeSystem Division, HP. “These HP platforms address the customer demand for high-throughput, energy-efficient designs as they build out their next-generation data centers.”

Power efficiency drives customer value

By implementing the Intel Xeon 5300 series processors in nine models of its HP ProLiant portfolio, HP is extending its product lineup to deliver improved system performance and greater energy efficiency.

The new processors enhance application performance while maintaining the currently shipping HP ProLiant power requirements, offering customers a business advantage when it comes to managing power costs. Furthermore, the new quad-core processor-based servers deliver up to 90 percent power usage efficiency by using highly efficient, HP-designed power supplies.

The new HP server lineup also offers a comprehensive server virtualization solution that includes rapid deployment, performance monitoring, virtual machine control and flexible migration.

“Intel and HP, leaders in the volume server market segment, have a long history of collaborating to provide industry-leading solutions that offer customers incredible new levels of performance and reliability as evidenced by HP’s world-record breaking 2P TPC-C benchmark,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president, Digital Enterprise Group, Intel. “By innovating on top of the industry’s first volume quad-core platforms from Intel, HP is delivering breakthrough solutions that can lower total cost of ownership for their customers through higher server utilization, even lower power consumption, and even greater performance headroom.”

Quad-core-based HP ProLiant servers can substantially increase the performance of vital applications such as database, enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, mail and messaging, virtual machines and high-performance compute clusters – without increased systems costs.

For example, in a recent two-tier SAP® Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark, results released on Nov. 10 show that the quad-core HP ProLiant BL480c server blade with two processors (2 processor/8 cores/8 threads) delivered industry-leading results, supporting 1,806 SAP SD Benchmark users at 1.98 seconds average dialog response time while achieving 9,050 SAPS, 181,000 fully processed order line items per hour and 543,000 dialog steps per hour. CPU utilization was balanced across the processors at 96 percent on the central server, while average database request time (dia/upd) was 44ms/16ms.(1) The server supported 588 more SAP SD Benchmark users than the BL480c did in a previous two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark, equaling a nearly 48 percent performance improvement.(2)

In online transaction processing, the HP ProLiant ML370 G5 using the Intel Xeon 5355 processor delivers the world’s fastest two-processor server performance with a record-breaking TPC-C benchmark of 240,737 tpmC @ $1.85/tpmC. This result is 18 percent faster than the best two-processor IBM result at less than half the cost.(3)

The servers available with Intel Xeon 5300 series processors will include the HP ProLiant ML150 G3, ML350 G5 and ML370 G5 tower-based servers, the DL140 G3, DL360 G5 and DL380 G5 rack-mount servers and the BL20p G4, BL460c and BL480c server blades.

HP ProLiant DL320s: Broadening scale-out capabilities

The HP ProLiant DL320s server is a new system designed for scale-out and media-rich computing environments. Fitting neatly into existing data center infrastructures within a compact 2U form factor, the ProLiant D320s offers a large internal storage capacity and a power-efficient compute platform ideal for video serving and mail and messaging applications as well as business intelligence and information search tasks.

The product, built with the Intel Xeon 3000 series processor, offers up to eight gigabytes (GB) RAM. In addition, the 12-bay standard hot-plug 3.5-inch drives provide up to nine terabytes (TB) of storage, supporting both high-performance serial attached SCSI (SAS) and high-capacity SATA drives. Two standard PCI-Express expansion slots allow the ProLiant DL320s to easily connect to storage networks and be managed from anywhere via HP’s Integrated Lights-Out management tool.

Helping to increase IT efficiency at reduced overall total cost of ownership, HP Services deployment and support portfolios for HP’s quad-core servers and the DL320s provide collaborative, accountable and flexible support solutions for fast server and storage deployment, server virtualization and ongoing environmental life cycle support management.

HP Workstations: Greater performance yields superior results

New HP workstations using the Intel Core 2 Extreme® QX6700 and Intel Xeon 5300 series processors feature superior multi-tasking abilities, greater performance on multi-threaded applications, and significantly lower power consumption compared to previous models.

The powerful performance, scalability and reliability of the quad-core processors combined with world-class HP workstations provide increased headroom for intensive computing applications.

HP workstation customers, including digital content creators, oil and gas engineers, and computer-aided manufacturing engineers, are now able to achieve shorter project cycle times and increased performance in a stable, multi-tasking environment.

Workstations available with Intel Xeon 5300 processors will include the HP xw6400 and xw8400 Workstations. The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processors will be offered on the HP xw4400 Workstation.

“HP and Intel are leading the pack by re-setting the standard with multi-core workstation computing,” said Jim Zafarana, vice president and worldwide marketing manager, Workstation Global Business Unit, HP. “The combination of quad-core power with renowned HP performance will enable customers to take workstations where they’ve never gone before.”

Pricing(4) and availability

The quad-core HP servers and workstations are currently available. Pricing for the quad-core-based ML150 starts at $2,039, the ML350 at $2,619, the ML370 at $3,739, the DL140 at $2,239, the DL360 at $2,789, the DL380 at $2,989, the BL20p at $2,729, the BL460c at $2,629 and the BL480c at $3,349. The DL320s starts at $2,799 and the workstations start at $2,349.

More information on HP ProLiant servers and HP Workstations is available at www.hp.com/go/proliant and www.hp.com/go/workstations, respectively. More information on services for HP ProLiant servers is available at http://h20219.www2.hp.com/services/cache/10768-0-0-225-121.html.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended July 31, 2006, HP revenue totaled $90.0 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com.

Note to editors: HP news releases are available via RSS feed at www.hp.com/hpinfo/rss.html.

(1) Results of the HP ProLiant BL480c on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark (Certification number 2006080) were achieved during tests performed on Nov. 1, 2006 by HP in Houston and certified on Nov. 10, 2006 achieving a result of 1,806 SAP SD Benchmark users. The benchmark was performed with the mySAP™ ERP 2005 application Release 6.0 running Microsoft Windows® Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition (64-bit) and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise x64 Edition (64-bit). The benchmark configuration included a quad-core HP ProLiant BL480c, two-way SMP (2 processor / 8 cores / 8 threads), Intel Xeon Quad-Core processor model 5355M, 2.66 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache per core, 4 MB L2 cache shared per 2 cores and 32 GB main memory.

(2) Results of the HP ProLiant BL480c on the two-tier SAP SD Standard Application Benchmark (Certification number 2006038) were achieved during tests performed on June 3, 2006 by HP in Houston and certified on June 23, 2006 achieving a result of 1,218 SAP SD Benchmark users. The benchmark was performed with the mySAP ERP 2004 Release 5.0 running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise x64 Edition (64-bit) and Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Enterprise x64 Edition (64-bit). The benchmark configuration included a dual-core HP ProLiant BL480c, two-way SMP (2 processor / 4 cores / 4 threads), Intel Xeon Dual-Core processor model 5160M, 3.0 GHz, 32 KB L1 cache per core, 4 MB L2 cache shared per 2 cores and 32 GB main memory. More information is available at www.sap.com/benchmark. All performance comparisons are as of Nov. 14, 2006.

(3) TPC-C results as of Nov. 9, 2006, www.tpc.org: HP ProLiant ML370 G5 – 240,737 tpmC @ $1.85/tpmC – available Nov. 22, 2006 – (2 processors/8 cores/8 threads); IBM eServer p5 570: 203,440 tpmC @ $3.93/tpmC – available Oct. 17, 2005 – (2 processors/4 cores/8 threads). TPC-C is a trademark of the Transaction Processing Performance Council.

(4) Estimated U.S. street prices. Actual prices may vary.