Integrity vs Proliant -- reliability and ease of service?

[damiri]

Hello, this is still only commercial talk. However, I have talked to some people and there are two stories:

- integrity has much better QC process before going out of factory
- proliant has almost same or better perfomanse for same size (CPU) servers

I don't know is this true or not. However, HP is selling this Integrity servers as business critical but I don't see clear difference between Proliant and Integrity in terms of support since you are anyway covering it with care packs.

My personal opinion that HP didn't expesct Intel to raise bar with these new Xeon processors but they were pushed with AMD Opteron which is still clear winner for database tasks because Hypertransport.

Again, everything comes down to price/performance and what actually IT manager believes in :-).

However, I would like to get your opinion for 2-4 to 2-8 processors comparation between two platforms since that's the place where most of our customers are ...

[Jozef_Novak]

Hello,

I have attended some HP sales-oriented actions recently so I thought this could be a good place to post some of my notes.

Basically, marketing points that highlight Integrity servers are performance and fault resiliency. In terms of performance, HP states that there's no way how an x86 world can beat Itanium processor's EPIC architecture in performance, no matter how many Xeons or AMD devices are there and how fast they are.

I terms of fault resiliency, the features of the Integrity chipset that were described earlier in this thread, really provide better failure detection, correction and isolation means than what is available to the x86 systems.

From hardware standpoint, entry level servers are similar in both families. When it comes to high end, Itanium servers like rx76XX, 86XX and Superdomes provide much less SPOFs, for there is no counterpart in x86 family to this kind of machines.

Jozef