HP announces that it has refreshed its entire line of HP Integrity servers – adding the most powerful models to date – to drive down the cost of business-critical computing for customers. The new HP Integrity Server line-up launch was carried in our region during a Partner Competitive Training event held in Istanbul on the 19th of September. Megabyte Limited was present for this launch, represented by Ing. Ivan Muscat, Manager of their Infrastructure and Engineering Services Unit. Very exciting times are coming for HP and its partners as it continues to lead the enterprise server market with its impressive server solutions. With 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 new servers reinforce HP’s long-held, IDC-reported position as the No. 1 high-end UNIX system vendor.

Additionally, HP has extended the multi-operating system capabilities of the HP Virtual Server Environment for Integrity servers to help customers grow and shrink virtual servers in response to changing business needs. Customers such as Bovespa, Brazil’s stock exchange, and Lucent Technologies are among those that have chosen the Integrity line for simplified management, secured availability and flexible capacity.

The new HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers offer mainframe-caliber high availability at entry-level server prices. Available with HP-UX 11i, Microsoft Windows®, Linux or OpenVMS operating environments, the servers provide the most flexibility and capacity in their class.

The HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers also now include the HP zx2 chipset, which delivers up to two times the energy efficiency of previous generations and slashes power and cooling costs by up to 50 percent. In addition, the Integrity line has doubled its capacity with the new dual-core Intel® Itanium® 2 "Montecito" processor.

"This new server lineup is a key example of HP’s 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," said Peter Hindle, HP Business Critical Servers business manager.

Multi-operating system capabilities offer a flexible IT environment

Leading the software industry in embracing the Integrity line is Microsoft, which is committed to Integrity as a key component of its business strategy of RISC replacement with the Windows platform.

"We are pleased to participate in the launch of HP’s next-generation Integrity servers," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft. "Today, customers are using HP Integrity servers, the Windows platform and SQL Server 2005 for the highest-end mission-critical business applications, providing solutions never before available on the Windows platform. Microsoft will continue our investment in the Itanium platform and the HP Integrity server line along with Windows Server ‘Longhorn,’ which will optimise for workloads focused on mission-critical high-end applications."

Later this year, HP plans to add support for Windows to HP Integrity Virtual Machines and allow multiple operating system instances to share a single processor. At that time, HP plans to extend support for HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor and Virtualization Manager to Windows and Linux. In addition to current support for HP-UX 11i, this extends the industry’s first integrated software family for planning, managing and automating virtual servers.

Many other independent software vendors also have embraced the Integrity platform, which now offers customers more than 9,000 applications across industries such as financial services, manufacturing, communications, media and entertainment, and the public sector.

Integrity servers running the HP Virtual Server Environment and a choice of operating systems enable customers to dynamically optimise IT investments across business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, J2EE application services, transactional database, and high-performance technical workloads.

Recently announced, HP Information Technology Service Management Assessment and Improvement Services process enhancements further increase uptime and productivity. The HP Data Centres Portfolio of Services also increases data centres efficiencies for space and power usage. These services help drive down the cost of computing.

"We have been pleased with the performance and support we have received from HP for its Integrity servers and look forward to similar results with this newest offering," said John Nichols, product manager, Lucent Technologies. "Lucent is committed to working closely with suppliers like HP to ensure we are delivering our customers the highest performance, most cost-effective solutions on the market."

"The platform change is already beginning to have a positive impact on Bovespa. As we migrate our mainframe system to the HP, Intel and Microsoft platform, we have noticed higher performance stability and fewer problems," said Luiz Gonzaga de Oliveira Simões, chief information officer, Bovespa. "In terms of transaction volume, if you compare us with large banks, Bovespa is small, but the criticality of its services is very high, which proves that our new platform is already mature enough to support mission-critical applications."

The Integrity offerings include HP’s latest OpenVMS v8.3 operating system, currently delivering additional security, disaster tolerance and scalable performance for more than 600 applications, with additional ones added on an ongoing basis.

About HP

HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and institutions globally. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, global services, business and home computing, and imaging and printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, 2006, HP revenue totaled $88.9 billion. More information about HP (NYSE, Nasdaq: HPQ) is available at www.hp.com

About Megabyte

Megabyte Ltd is a leading IT services company providing Total Computer Solutions to private and public sector entities by enabling them to use information technology to solve complex business or organisation problems, to improve performance and add value to their customers. Megabyte provides these services by continual investment and development of its human resources to engineer and deliver solutions using state-of-the-art products and tools from its strategic partners, ORACLE (Technology & Applications), MICROSOFT (Technology & Applications), MICROSOFT Great Plains, , MICROS-FIDELIO, DATACARD, , and Hewlett Packard  for Enterprise and Storage Solutions

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