Upgraded blades are now available for both the BladeSymphony 1000, the industry’s first enterprise-class blade server – one that can service mission-critical, enterprise-level computing needs while lowering the total cost of ownership – and for the BladeSymphony 320, which simplifies edge-tier and application-tier consolidation. Both upgraded versions continue to improve upon a performance per watt ratio that is enabling the datacenter to become more efficient and responsive to changing environmental concerns.

“The ongoing collaboration between Hitachi and Intel continues to raise the bar in the blade server industry,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Server Platforms Group. “We are excited to have Hitachi’s BladeSymphony customers realize the performance, energy efficiency and virtualization benefits of the Intel® Itanium® and Xeon® platforms today, while we continue to evolve the future capabilities of our platforms.”

Matt Eastwood, group vice president, Enterprise Platform Research at IDC, said, “IDC believes that the compute platform for the datacenter of the future will be bladed. Customers are looking for enterprise class capabilities in a blade form factor and Hitachi understands the need for improved energy efficiency and performance.”

For the BladeSymphony 1000, Hitachi has introduced upgraded versions that are now the highest-performing Itanium-based blades on the market. New versions of dual-core models utilizing Intel’s Itanium® 9100 series processors, as well as versions running on dual-core Xeon 5200 processors and quad-core Xeon 5400 processors, feature improved power efficiency, faster processor and system performance, and enhanced virtualization based on Intel’s upgraded virtualization technology.

There are also new versions of the BladeSymphony 320 available. A version that supports the Xeon® 5200 series and Xeon® 5400 series processors features improvements in the blade’s virtualization capabilities, power efficiency, and overall performance. Another new version of the BladeSymphony 320 features Xeon chips that allow for low-voltage memory and processor technologies. These are designed specifically to reduce power consumption by 20-30 percent and to enable a higher density of blades to be powered by a standard 110-volt wall socket. It is the highest-density 6U server available.

In addition, the new versions of BladeSymphony were created with customer flexibility and investment protection in mind. All blades are ‘field-expandable’, which means that customers using existing BladeSymphony systems do not need to buy a completely new unit, since older and new generations of Intel processors can be mixed and matched in the same chassis. As such, customers can add one the new blades to their existing chassis and instantly begin experiencing performance upgrades.

“We chose to use the latest BladeSymphony 1000 with Virtage in our datacenter because of the scalability, flexibility, power efficiency and pure computing power it offers,” said Jeremiah Jahn, CTO of Judici.com, a provider of record-keeping software for the Illinois justice system. “With the embedded virtualization capabilities of Virtage, we’ve been able to implement up to 14 different partitions on just two blades. This translates to tremendous cost savings and – with Virtage and the updated Intel Xeon chipsets – an even faster datacenter.”

Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing for the Hitachi Server Systems Group, said, “The BladeSymphony’s legacy of innovation is that of a journal in a way. Every continued upgrade to the system has significance to the enterprise. The question becomes whether organizations want a do-it-yourself model or a professional team that has countless years of server experience. The journal of innovation we have written in constantly improving BladeSymphony is representative of Hitachi’s continued commitment to keeping the customers’ need for flexibility and scalability top of mind.”

In related news, Hitachi also announced:

* A web-based console for BladeSymphony 320: Hitachi has developed an interface for BladeSymphony that addresses tasks in two categories – common administrative tasks and tasks prone to error. The web-based console provides a visual interface that decreases maintenance and installation time as well as a schema for validation that reduces the risk of making an error that will result in adverse effects to the system.
* A two-fold increase in maximum disk space addressing the needs of expanding on-demand databases, richer multimedia and records management that organizations face.
* A number of new resellers that expand the group’s reach nationwide. These include Praecipio Consulting, Consiliant, Data Partner Group and I-Access.

“Virtualized architectures are gaining momentum in China as a better way to run datacenters,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “Through our relationship with Lenovo and its world-class brand, we are making VMware virtualization more broadly available to the Chinese market. With VMware virtualization, Lenovo customers can quickly experience its significant business benefits including reducing operating and capital costs by as much as 50 percent, delivering applications more quickly and reliably in virtual machines, and improving security across the datacenter and on the desktop.”

“Together with VMware, our customers will have access to a versatile technology that is helping to transform IT in China and around the globe,” said William J. Ameilio, president and chief executive officer of Lenovo. “Coupling Lenovo’s leading server products with VMware’s broad range of award-winning virtualization solutions will help customers as they come to terms with the rapid datacenter growth taking place in businesses throughout China.”

Customers can now purchase Lenovo servers pre-installed with VMware’s market-leading datacenter virtualization and management platform, VMware Infrastructure 3, provided with full support from Lenovo. VMware Infrastructure 3 enables automatic load balancing, business continuity and power management and the ability to move a virtual machine across physical machines to minimize service interruption. VMware Infrastructure 3 is also compatible with VMware’s desktop virtualization and management solutions.

See also:

• N.Y. Fights Crime With Wireless Video Surveillance (0)
• Lexar Media Announces the Crucial Reliance Program for Server and Workstation Memory (0)
• New Lenovo Management Console (0)
• Thermal Power Generating Units With a Capacity of Below 300MW per Generator to Be Restricted or Banned in China (0)
• Dramatic Virtualization Performance (0)

Together, the combined solution offers customers benefits that are not available with competing proprietary solutions, including:

* Support for AMD’s Rapid Virtualization Indexing technology;
* Support for virtual guests configured with more than four CPUs; and
* Fully virtualized performance that approaches the performance of non-virtualized environments.

Red Hat has worked with HP and AMD to deliver affordable operational flexibility on all workloads, including high-end applications and databases, by allowing for more efficient use of hardware resources.

In addition to providing a highly scalable, power-efficient processor, Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors include support for an advanced virtualization feature called Rapid Virtualization Indexing, which improves the efficiency of virtual guest operating systems’ memory management. HP is the first hardware vendor to offer systems equipped with these processors. Utilizing “on-die” silicon resources rather than software, AMD Virtualization™ technology with Rapid Virtualization Indexing can greatly reduce hypervisor cycles and the performance penalty that is commonly associated with virtualization.

“Red Hat and AMD have worked very closely with the open source community to ensure that full support for Rapid Virtualization Indexing is available with the first Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based systems to be offered by a leading hardware OEM,” said Earl Stahl, vice president, Software Development at AMD. “We’ve been able to ensure that customers can reap the benefits of this new virtualization technology right away. We have been delighted with the excellent performance that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved. Red Hat, AMD and HP customers now have available one of the fastest and most scalable virtualization platforms on the market today.”

These features, in combination with Red Hat’s new para-virtualized device drivers, offer significant performance gains that allow an easier and more effective transition to virtualized environments than offered by competing virtualization products. In OLTP (online transaction processing) testing, measured in transactions per minute, Red Hat Enterprise Linux showed that a 16-CPU fully virtualized guest using the new Rapid Virtualization Indexing feature and para-virtualized drivers enjoyed a 21-fold performance gain and reached 77 percent of the performance of a non-virtualized environment on one of the industry’s most difficult database OLTP workloads.

“Customers have embraced virtualization but have been unable to realize the benefits throughout their entire infrastructure,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. “Customers have been reluctant to virtualize key enterprise applications due to concerns over scalability and performance, relegating the current generation of virtualization solutions to consolidation of QA and to development systems. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors on HP ProLiant servers, customers are able to leverage the benefits of virtualization without paying the performance penalty associated with traditional solutions.”

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is optimized to support today’s large SMP systems, for both host and virtual-guest operating environments. Performance tests show excellent scalability to match the 16-core capabilities of the new HP systems. Red Hat’s customers are able to dynamically configure each guest, adding and removing CPU cores, and allowing guests to use all the available resources of these large SMP systems.

“Customers can achieve lower energy costs while reducing server sprawl and the time needed to complete common data center tasks when using HP Insight software alongside the HP ProLiant DL585 – an ideal virtualization platform,” said Scott Farrand, vice president, Industry Standard Server Software, HP. “The ongoing, open collaboration between HP and Red Hat has greatly contributed to the performance and scalability enhancements of HP systems such as the DL585.”

See also:

• AMD Extends the Mainstream Value of Dragon Platform Technology with 45nm AMD Phenom II Triple-Core Processors (0)
• Lexar Media Announces the Crucial Reliance Program for Server and Workstation Memory (0)
• Increase Adoption of VMware Virtualization in China (0)
• Microsoft and Novell Extend Reach of Interoperability Collaboration to China (0)