Hardware vendors need to scale up and to scale out, and often try to do both at once. HP has multiple product lines, and is differentiate its Integrity NonStop and Superdome server lines further by scaling in different directions, an event in Barcelona heard today.

With a new line of Integrity NonStop X servers available in Q1 2015, HP makes a dramatic move, ditching the HP-branded ServerNet interconnect fabric in favor of InfiniBand (and swappingt Itanium for x86).  Meanwhile a new Superdome X series scales up to support 16-socket x86.

“You’ve really got to understand what these people are doing.  They’re running big, mission-critical infrastructure,” states Randy Meyer, HP’s vice president and general manager for the Integrity server lines, speaking with DatacenterDynamics.  He’s referring to both intended sets of customers for HP’s “X” server lines.  “Manufacturing plants, payment systems, telcos, retailers, reservation systems.  We’ve taken all the things that live in this mission-critical space, and then moved them so they can also take advantage of Intel Xeon architecture.”

NonStop is now standard hardware
The entire NonStop software stack has completed its move to x86 architecture, now utilizing HP’s already battle-tested BL 460c blades.  “It still gives you the value proposition of always-on, always available, doesn’t lose transactions, doesn’t lose data,” continues Meyer, “and it’s targeting some pretty specific workloads: high-end payment systems, stock exchange trading, manufacturing execution systems – those sorts of things that are real-time are going to stay on NonStop, and what the customers there are looking for are resilience, performance, longevity, because they’re embedded into their infrastructure and they don’t want to change them.”

What they perhaps do wish would change, however, is HP’s interconnect strategy.  The move to InfiniBand has been an ongoing exodus, having begun in 2013.  Today’s announcement essentially signals the end of the Itanium era, as HP is now completely embracing Intel Xeon architecture for both platforms.  But at the same time, the company is careful to distinguish how the two product lines’ respective workloads mandate different scaling dimensions.

“With NonStop X, moving the interconnect to InfiniBand is a huge deal, because of the fact that it’s all standard,” says Meyer. “NonStop runs on completely off-the-shelf hardware; there’s no proprietary hardware in there.  And it means you can connect other kinds of applications, running on Linux or Windows, more seamlessly in a NonStop environment… Now you can have your NonStop infrastructure handling payments, reservations, trading, whatever it may be, and surround it with maybe a mobile phone handling system, or a fraud management system, and have this huge flexibility.”

Superdome gets more resilient
Meanwhile, with respect to Superdome X, Meyer notes that customers who move their workloads into Linux have been demanding the resilience and high availability of a Unix environment.  Now Superdome customers can move workloads into Superdome’s hard partitioning of sockets and local storage, thus reducing their software licensing costs, while at the same time, improve their throughput by (based on HP’s projections) 4x over Unix.  Superdome X’s maximum of 16 sockets and 12 TB can be partitioned into 2- or 4-socket partitions, he says.

The HP VP adds that Superdome’s customers tend to fall into two categories: one that would prefer to fill all 16 sockets with 18-core Xeons, and a second tier that goes the exact opposite direction with a minimum of cores – as low as 6 – but with high frequency.  With Intel’s latest Xeon processors (as Intel itself has confirmed for us), different SKUs are tuned for these two categories, without leaving out the low core-count group.

“Most x86 architectures today are based around scale-out.  Take a bunch of two-socket servers, rack them up.  Not every problem scales out that way.  If you think about it, there are big databases, big applications that want to live in a single place.”  One example Meyer provides is a manufacturing plant whose configuration system maintains as many as 67 billion conceivable assemblies.  “That does not lend itself to scale-out at all.  They want one single set of inventory immediately.”

Another lucrative workload HP is targeting here is in-memory databases, which SAP pioneered with HANA and which Microsoft and Oracle have been following up with.  These workloads require high memory capacity and large socket counts in order for big data operating systems such as Hadoop to optimize their operation and maintain consistency and determinism – a critical property of high-performance workloads.

Meyer acknowledges that the new Superdome X servers have actually been shipping for a little while, though the new Integrity NonStop X servers will be available in March 2015.