Hitachi plans to launch on Tuesday a new generation of BladeSymphony blade servers, which can be linked into larger multiprocessor systems or subdivided through virtualisation.
The new system, like its predecessor, is a rack-mounted chassis 17.5 inches tall that can accommodate eight dual-processor blades using either Itanium or Xeon chips from Intel. Unlike its predecessor, however, it has significant new hardware features for those slotting in the Itanium blades, said Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing for Hitachi America's server group.
First is virtualisation technology, called Virtage, which permits a single Itanium server to run multiple operating systems simultaneously. It does this, however, without using virtualisation software such as Xen. With Virtage, separate operating systems can share specified portions of computing resources, such as processor power, memory and input-output capacity, said Paul Figliozzi, chief systems architect at Hitachi.
Second is the ability to link up as many as four blades containing the new Itanium 2 9000 "Montecito" processor so they make a single multiprocessor machine. The system accommodates up to 128GB of memory, but has no built-in hard drives and therefore requires either a separate storage blade or networked storage to boot up, Figliozzi said.
Hitachi plans to bring both the Virtage and symmetrical multiprocessor (SMP) abilities to blades with Xeon processors, Figliozzi added. But he declined to specify when the company plans to make that move. The Itanium-only nature of the features left at least one analyst cool, though.
"This product's most distinguishing features — its built-in virtualisation and ability to aggregate blades into larger SMPs — are for Itanium only, today. While technically interesting, this will be a major hurdle to selling this in volume outside of Hitachi's home Japanese market," Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff said.
The BladeSymphony product will go on sale on 1 January in the US, a new beachhead for a company historically more focused on the Japanese market. But Hitachi plans "a really aggressive push into the North America marketplace", Campbell said.
The company hadn't set product prices at the time of writing.
Hitachi doesn't sell x86 servers using AMD's Opteron processor and has no plans to do so, Campbell added.
