It's taken a while for vendors to start shipping systems based on the latest 64-bit Itanium 2 processor, but they are now starting to appear. One such is the rx2600 from HP, the entry-level member of the all-new HP Integrity range of servers.

Entry-level is, in fact, a bit of a misnomer here, as the Integrity rx2600 is a powerful application server platform designed to out-gun both 32-bit Intel products and rival 64-bit RISC-based solutions. To this end, the 2U rack-mount casing holds a custom HP motherboard featuring the company's own zx1 chipset, co-developed with Intel to provide not just multi-processing support but also low-latency (78ns) DDR memory access plus PCI, PCI-X and AGP controllers.

Up to two processors can be accommodated on this board, and these can be the latest 1.5GHz Itanium 2 chips with 6MB of Level 3 cache. Added to this there's room for an impressive 24GB of memory, with ECC protection and chip sparing support both provided as standard.

As in any rack-mount solution, space is naturally at a premium, but the neat layout makes the most of what's available and many of the legacy interfaces have been discarded in favour of USB. Gigabit and 10/100Mbps Ethernet interfaces have also been integrated on-board and the designers have even managed to squeeze in a management processor with dedicated Ethernet and serial ports of its own for remote, out of band, management.

Plus, of course, there's lots of built-in redundancy, including hot-swap fans and, if required, hot-swappable power supplies that slide in at the front for extra convenience.

A dual-channel, Ultra320 SCSI controller looks after the storage with three hot-plug drive bays capable of providing up to 438GB of internal capacity. On the downside there are no built-in RAID facilities. However, on a server of this type the local disks are mostly used by the operating system, with application data held on external arrays or a Storage Area Network (SAN).

An external SCSI connector is provided for this purpose, plus it's possible to link to external storage using a pull-out expansion cage containing four 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X slots, which can also be used to add local RAID facilities. Unfortunately these adapters can't be hot-swapped but, given the cramped format, that's no real drawback and you can always double-up for resilience.

When it comes to software the rx2600 can be pre-loaded with a number of 64-bit operating systems, including HP-UX and the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2003. Red Hat and SuSE Linux can also be specified and, when released, the 64-bit implementation of OpenVMS can also be used.

Given the specification and high price compared to 32-bit Xeon alternatives, the Integrity rx2600 is clearly not the kind of server you'd buy to host simple Web sites. Rather it's aimed at companies looking to run demanding scientific and technical applications or to host large back-end databases.

These markets are currently dominated by proprietary 64-bit RISC-based systems, compared to which the Integrity rx2600 has performance to match at a price that's hard to argue with.

Not a small business solution by any means, the Integrity rx2600 combines the latest 64-bit Itanium 2 processors with HP's own zx1 chipset and up to 24GB of memory. The end result matches proprietary RISC platforms on performance while undercutting them on price, to run scientific/technical applications or to host clustered commercial databases.