HP rolls out Itanium 2 servers

Hewlett-Packard hammered home its commitment to the Itanium 2 chips this week, announcing new mid- and high-end members of its Integrity family of servers with the Madison chip, along with new support for OpenVMS 8.2, Novell's (Profile, Products, Articles) version of Linux, bundled virtualization software and, for the first time, a pay-per-use policy for server-based Windows. The refreshed servers, which include those all the way up to HP's Superdome, run on average 25 percent faster than their predecessors. The added performance of the system is due not only to improved chip and other hardware technologies but software as well, according to company officials.

"A lot of the performance increase comes from the compilers and not just from the chips. It is not just about packing more transistors in or the clock speed, it is the maturity of the compilers and the performance it can deliver," said Don Jenkins, vice president of marketing for HP's Business Critical Server unit.

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