Claimed to have more than twice the performance of the previous generation of HP Integrity servers and less than half the price-to-performance ratio of competitive offerings, these servers are intended to reinforce HPs IDC-reported position as the number one high-end Unix system vendor.

Additionally, HP says that it has extended the multi-operating system capabilities of the HP Virtual Server Environment for Integrity servers, aiming to help customers to grow and shrink virtual servers in response to changing business needs. Rand Water is among the organisations that have chosen the Integrity line.

The HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers are designed to offer mainframe-calibre high availability at entry-level server prices. According to HP, they are available with HP-UX 11i, Microsoft Windows, Linux or OpenVMS operating environments.

The HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers also now include the HP zx2 chipset, which is designed to deliver up to twice the energy efficiency of previous generations, and to slash power and cooling costs by up to 50%. In addition, the Integrity line has doubled its capacity with the dual-core Intel Itanium 2 'Montecito' processor. HP says.

This server line-up is an example of HPs Adaptive Infrastructure offerings, which help customers stay ahead of changing business and IT demands and enable them to build cost-effective, next-generation data centres, says Andrew Fletcher, business development manager: business-critical systems, HP.