HP Integrity server family Bad Rap

[Matthew Ghofrani]

I am constantly being told that HP's Itanium servers with Intel chips are really horrible and HP has made a big mistake going that route.

I really want to know your honest to goodness impression, whether or not you have had first hand experience and whether or not you had done any comparison with others.

We are a big rp8400 house and I have to be honest it bothers me if I find out the stories I hear are all made up for one reason or other.

Please be candid with me and share your thoughts.

Matthew from Boston

[Pete Randall]

Matthew,

I believe that most of the negative reactions came from the earlier generations of Itanium, which did have some problems. The latest versions seem to be just fine.


Pete (from Vermont)

[Arunvijai_4]

Hi Matthew,

As pete said, Itanium 1 processor family was having problems which were rectified by newer generation Itanium-2 processors. Itanium 2 is performing well on mission critical platforms and it will be the future of 64 bit computing.

-Arun

[Rick Garland]

We have numerous rx4640 systems with HPUX 11.23 and they are running MCSG 11.16 & 11.17 with Oracle 11.5.10

We have an uptime of 99.97% for the last 10 months on these rx systems. They have been solid performers. These are connected to 2 redundant fibers with SAN storage on 2 different EVAs. (EVA 5000 and EVA 8000)
These systems are CSS systems so we keep the patches up to date. We have semi-regular maintenance windows (sometimes do not use so these systems are not rebooted on a regular basis). Performance has been good.

Doing some tasks requires a different methodology. Examples, mirror the root disk, booting from an Ignite server, the EFI, etc.

We have not been doing any partitioning or running any other OS besides HPUX so I have no knowledge there.

But for HPUX, been a good system.

[Matthew Ghofrani]

Thanks for sharing your inputs. Any other stories good or bad? I am really interested to know about where these bad rap stories are coming from. I am not convinced that just having some issues with Rev 1 would have created the enormous negative wibes that I get in hour rp8400 house. I have recently read that HP and Intel and bunch of other companies have pledged a 10 Billion dollar investment toward Itanium chips and for the life of me I just can't buy the idea that they are all bunch of stupid people which can't see the light. Meaning they are heading down a wrong path. I really appreciate knowing more of what you think specially folks if any which originally wanted to go with Itanium but changed their mind or vise versa.

Matthew from Boston

[Torsten.]

Hi Matthew,

this question first: Are you satisfied with the rp8400s? At the moment, all PA-RISC systems have their equivalent Integrity system. For example rp8420 and rx8620, rp3440 and rx2620, rp4440 and rx4640. The same hardware (more or less), you can run the same OS (11i v2 for the moment), but they have different CPUs. In the Superdome, you can even have PA-RISC and Itanium CPUs at the same time (in different partitions).
Newer servers in future will have only Itanium CPUs, I guess. They are top rated in different performance measures.

The biggest problem is the public image that the name "Itanium" has. IMHO, it came from the first generation in conjunction with a Windows XP like OS version. At this time, the CPU was big, expensive, power consuming and *slow*. It could be compared (with this XP-like OS) to a normal PC and the PC was faster and cheaper.

A PC couldn't have up to 64 CPUs or more, but this was never the point. In this time, the first hp Itanium system came out (something like rx96xx), but I've never seen it.

The bad start of this cpu is the biggest problem.

Nowadays the Integrity systems are very reliable and fast. This is my experience.

Regards
Torsten from germany

[Matthew Ghofrani]

Thanks Torsten from germany for your input.

[Matthew Ghofrani]

I am personally satisfied with RP8400s. We have 6 of them with one housing an SEU. We have a total of 20 servers in this area with mixture of physical and virtual servers while running variety of apps like Oracle, Peplesoft and others in a MC ServiceGuard env with about 8 nodes and just about 10 packages.

Our move is toward more virtualization and more bang for the bucks that Itanium does offer along with other competitors.

That's were I come in to really get the myth out of bad or good perceptions out of different hardware/platforms.

Matthew from Boston

[Torsten.]

The RX can do what the RP can do for you and even more. With new CPU generations and the sx2000 chipset the Integrities will become faster and faster. You can run different OS versions like HP-UX, Linux, different Windows and OpenVMS. Even NonStop servers are using Itanium CPUs now.

In terms of virtualization the vPar solution is working fine, but virtual machines (only on Integrity) will provide much more flexibility.

Remember, there are a couple of millions PC "experts" talking about Itanium, but only some thousand people have really seen it working.

[Paul Jerrom]

Howdy,
Let's face it, FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) will be thrown by all competitors and luddites.
We trialled some early generation Itanium servers, and were not impressed by the performance. However, the early hardware was running early operating system and early layered products - and the behaviour on Alpha is different to that on Itanium.
We now have low end Itaniums, (rx2620s) and we have found them every bit as good performance wise as the Alphas they are replacing.
I recently got back from the VMS Bootcamp in Nashua, one of the sessions compared performance of a particular database under Alpha and Itanium, and showed it to be at least as good on the latter (sorry, can't be more specific, the preso was under NDA). Speak to your friendly neighbourhood HP rep, they should be able to give you some benchark figures.
So if you use the latest OS and latest compilers, IMHO there won't be performance issues.
Have fun,
PJ