HP 9000 Superdome server

[Achilles_2]

shalom,

My company was purchased plenty of old PA-RISC 9000/800 series servers, but now I know that this kind of machine be fade out already. The question is our parts of product must run under PA-RISC architecture. I search new product called HP 9000 Superdome server on HP US Official Web site. It said that:

“HP supports mixed Intel Itanium/PA-RISC architecture environments by the end of 2005 in the Superdome server. PA-8900 processors will be able to coexist with Intel Itanium 2 processors in the same cabinet but in separate partitions.”

Is it meant that it can support two kinds of architecture?

Also I'm interested in hearing peoples opinions on what to replace them? PA-RISC? Itanium?

Thanks

[Bill Hassell]

The Superdome is the top of the line product and is can indeed house Itanium and PA-RISC processors. They must be partitioned because they cannot coexist in the same system. This hardware partitioning essentially means that you are housing separate machines in the same box.

Since this is a premium model (read: price is VERY expensive) and your product must run on PA-RISC, look at the PA-RISC products:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/5982-3520EN.PDF

[Sameer_Nirmal]

Yes. The latest so called 3 generation (sx2000 chipset based) Superdome ( 4th release) does support both PA-RISC and Itanium processor architectures in separate hard partition (npar) within the same cabinet.

Be aware the PA-RISC architecure has reached it's development end with PA8900 processor is the last PA-RISC processor. Hence the future is Itanium Architecute with HP servers. In order to facilitate the smooth transision from ending PA-RISC to future Itanium, the mixing of architecute is done so that the customer can I upgrade to Itanium whenever he is ready to do so without the need to replace the server h/w ( except the PA-RISC processors of course ).

Refer my post to know backgrouond details at
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1044136

I guess you are thinking about having Superdome to get rid of multiple 9000/800 servers. One has to think about how far the solution ( having superdome ) is technically viable depending on the needs of the applications, cost etc. Since your application is PA-RISC specific, you need to think about migrating it to Itanium architecure. HP does offer services for such migration to Itanium.