Hewlett-Packard's consolidation task is considerably less difficult when it comes to its present industry standard Intel servers, but porting operating systems and hardware to the upcoming Itanium platform is a different story.
The company simply announced that with the exception of the low-end HP Server 2100 and 2110 Celeron-based servers, the bulk of its Intel servers will be phased out between now and the end of October. It will rebrand Compaq's ProLiant servers as HP ProLiants.
That means that the e200, e800, lc2000, lh3000, lp1000r, lp2000, lh6000r, lt6000r, lxr8500, tc4100, and tc3100 will disappear and only be supported for the next five years. It also means that the newest HP Server tc 6100 and 7100, which were introduced last month, will never ship, sources say.
HP has a bigger job on its hands converging PA-RISC, Alpha and MIPS processors onto Intel's 64-bit Itanium processor.
The company will introduce a new PA-RISC processor, the 8800 next year that is targeted at new businesses and the present installed base. It will follow the 8800 with a PA-RISC 8900 in 2004, after which it will phase out PA-RISC. Both the 8800 and 8900 use the same dual processor in the same package as IBM's POWER4 processor.
The Alpha processor, which is using EV68 technology now, will be revved next year with the EV7 and be targeted at only the present installed base. The EV79 will follow in 2004, after which the processor will be phased out.
As for OpenVMS, it too will be migrated to Itanium. An early developer's kit for OpenVMS 7.3x on Itanium will appear early next year. Full support for Version 7.3 will be in 2004. Sources indicate that 7.3x is presently running on Itanium in HP labs.
Tru64 Unix suffers a different fate. HP will continue volume sales of the operating system through 2006 and support it through 2011. The company will migrate Tru64's clustering and file system capabilities to HP-UX. In 2003, HP will introduce a version called 11.23, which includes migration tools and common system management. At the same time, HP will introduce a 64-CPU version in 2003 a version of Tru64 Unix code-named Vail. The company will follow it with Utah in 2004.
In 2004, HP-UX will take on features of Tru64 Unix. In 2005, the company will incorporate the Tru64 advanced file system. Version 11.30 in 2005 will include self-tuning and adapting software.
Non-Stop Server will be sold through 2005 on MIPS and supported through 2010. The Non-Stop kernel will be migrated to Itanium in 2004.