Was a bit worried we'd see more new Xeon boxes than Opterons.

HP have been losing out to Dell at the bottom end of the market over internal disk capacity. HP went with 2.5" drives in their low end DL servers, where Dell stuck with 3.5" drives which offered a much higher capacity. It looks like we won't be seeing a 2.5" 300GB disk in the near future, so HP had to release these boxes to stay competitive.

I *like* the HP 2.5" SAS drives. They're fast, quiet and cool.

We've got a site with three HPs and they're still drowned out by the one Dell 745 NAS.

you're making noise comparisons of current gen HP servers to 3 gen old Dell ones?

when's that one coming out? surely with Common System Interconnect it ought to be relatively simple to get Proliants with Itanium Inside (TM) as well as Xeon inside? Wouldn't this minimise HP's engineering development and ongoing support costs, making Itanium more affordable for anyone wanting lower end HP-UX and VMS machines, as well as offering a nice entry level box for anyone who may have other reasons for wanting Itanium?

Integrity RX2660 and BL860c are the low end Itainium boxes.

I doubt you will ever see an Itainium ProLiant IMHO.

Umm, four HDD's in 1U isn't new - and if it's a first for HP they should keep it quiet. Apple's first Xserve in 2002 had 4 HDD's (in caddies too), SuperMicro have always had a crap-load of 1U 4 HDD chassis... I'm too bored to make a longer list.

Admittedly, an HP chassis is full of plastic "stuff", strange boxy hinged metal things and no space for cables.

Like Ikea, HP are purveyors of self-assembly furniture, which more often than not, come with the wrong bits.

Why would that be? Aren't Intel being entirely honest about the virtues of QuickPath (Common System Interconnect's official name)? If QuickPath does do what it's supposed to, how long will HP be able to afford to duplicate low-end hardware and firmware/software engineering and support resources, just for the sake of internal HP politics?