HP announces new DL380 G6, DL360 G6

With yesterdays official announcement of the Nehalem Xeons, all major server manufacturers announced their new product lineup. HPs new announcements are equally interesting as what IBM has announced.

HP DL380 G6 Quickspecs

HP DL360 G6 Quickspecs

There are some interesting things to see there - unlike IBM, HP chose to go with 18 memory slots, allowing each CPU’s three channels to drive three memory modules. HP also offers a flash-based Memory configuration tool, that alleviates having to learn complicated placement rules.

HP also offers more disks per system, allowing a DL 380 G6 configuration with 16 2.5″ drives in 2U server. The DL360 G6 can have up to 8 2.5″ drives - that’s the same number of drives that previous generations had in a 2U form factor!

Having the ability to add lots of local storage is a good thing in smaller businesses. Larger companies probably won’t need that as much. Interestingly, HP choose to stay with a traditional BIOS with their G6 series. IBM is already offering UEFI on their x3550 M2 / x3650 M2.

Another new thing that i gleaned from those documents is the ability to choose a power supply based on the expected load of the server - making it possible to favor higher efficiency (for example, if you do not intend to have local disks in the server, as you’re planning to use your SAN).