HP announced a variety of new Integrity products at an event it co-hosted with Intel last week in San Francisco. Representatives from both companies repeatedly stressed the needs of mission-critical environments, with HP casting the biggest spotlight on the newest offering in its Superdome server line.

These high-end servers are intended for demanding, always-on scenarios, and HP reps claimed the newest iteration can triple the performance of earlier systems while also consuming less energy. The performance boost was attributed partly to HP's engineers but also to Intel's Itanium 9500-series processors, which were also announced last week. The new chips offer double the processing cores of their predecessors, with top configurations supporting up to eight.