HP has chosen Itanium to upgrade Integrity NonStop servers. According to Randy Meyer, director of strategy, technology and education for HP, the new Integrity NonStop line will be available in July.

HP acquired the NonStop line through its acquisition of Compaq in 2002. Compaq acquired NonStop through its purchase of Tandem in 1997. To this point, NonStop machines were based on MIPS (define) processors.

The NonStop servers are mostly used by stock exchanges, banks and airlines for handling critical electronic transactions. The systems are called NonStop because even if they fail, they have built-in redundancy to prevent the loss of transactions. HP said its NonStop servers have a reliability rate of 99.999 percent.

The new server, called HP Integrity NonStop server, will be capable of scaling up from two Itanium processors to 4,000 Itanium processors. The cost will depend on the configuration, but the base price for a NonStop system is about $400,000.

"We're seeing ISVs adopt it at a rapid rate, and the performance curve has been tremendous underneath that," Meyer said. "Every major ISV is running on Itanium. 90 percent of our Tier 1 ISVs have certified their applications already, and they've come over [onto Itanium] and had zero issues on the conversion."

HP also announced the last processor for its PA RISC-based servers, PA-8900, which will eventually mark the end of HP's proprietary chip line for Unix servers. HP plans to support servers using PA-RISC processors until 2011.