IBM, HP, and ultra-dense cheap computing [UPDATED]

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Michael Feldman with some perspective on the recent HP and IBM dense computing solution announcements

With HP’s rollout of the new ProLiant BL2x220c G5 today, the company has an answer for IBM’s recently announced iDataPlex server. Both are extra-dense server architectures designed for scaled out datacenters. That means these boxes are aimed at cloud computing, Web 2.0 and high performance computing, the current hot markets in the IT industry. In this ultra-scale arena, compute density, energy efficiency and price-performance all seem to be converging. Hardware reliability takes a back seat to being able to quickly swap out fried parts.

There is also a review piece at IT Jungle on HP’s dense computing move here.

SCIO [ed: the Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Organization], which is akin to OSLO (HP’s cross-divisional Open Source and Linux Organization, which has spearheaded its drive into open source products and support for them), will be headed up by Christine Martino, who ran the HPC division at the company. And she concedes that the overlap between the requirements of the two customer sets she is chasing don’t overlap perfectly. “Massive scale is a common requirement,” says Martino, “but Web 2.0 customers are driving a different set of metrics, such as performance per watt or dollars per megawatt of electricity.”