HP drops eight-processor Xeon servers

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and above, we see the market space driven by our Integrity platforms," models employing Intel's Itanium, he said.

Dell has announced its new four-processor models already, the PowerEdge 6800 and 6850. IBM also announced its four-processor x366 in February and put it on sale Tuesday. Sun discontinued its Xeon models and now sells only x86 servers using AMD's Opteron. Many other companies, including NEC, Penguin Computing, Unisys, Fujitsu and Acer also sell x86 servers.

All the new servers employ Intel's E8500 chipset, which will accommodate future dual-core Xeon processors scheduled to arrive in 2006.

New memory protection features
HP's DL580 G3 is a rack-mounted model that measures four rack units--4U, or 7 inches--in height. It employs a technology called hot-plug RAID memory that permits administrators to change a faulty memory module in a running server without disrupting operations. It can accommodate as much as 32GB of memory; a bare-bones model costs $6,849.

The ML570 G3 is similar but larger. It has 10 input-output slots to the DL580's seven, can accommodate 48GB of memory, and has more hard drive capacity. It's available as either a standalone model or a 6U (10.5-inch) rack-mount machine. Its starting price is $5,249.

HP also began selling its dual-processor ML350 G4p, which uses the faster Xeon MP processor code-named Irwindale available with as much as 2MB of cache memory. That system has a starting price of $1,539.

It doesn't employ hot-plug RAID memory but instead offers a less expensive alternative called online spare memory. With it, the machine can switch to a spare memory module if it detects that a primary one is faulty, but replacing the bad module requires that the server be shut down.

Support for this technology, unlike the hot-plug RAID memory, requires operating system support, which is available in Windows Server 2003 today and is expected in Linux by the end of 2005, Lacey said.

Four-Xeon blade servers also are under development at HP.

"Don't have anything to announce at this time," Lacey said. "We will be coming back in a few weeks with some additional products to talk about there."