Hewlett-Packard will soon find out if its multimillion dollar support of Intel's Itanium processor will produce a return on investment. Tuesday, HP announced an addition to its NonStop product family that yields an Itanium under its iron called Integrity NonStop. The server can scale to up to 4,080 Itanium 2 processors.

According to HP, the servers offer twice the performance of earlier models at half the cost. Integrity NonStop servers are the third Itanium-based offering from HP, which first partnered with Intel to develop the chip in 1994.

The Itanium is a 64-bit processor designed for heavy computing tasks, which is targeted at industries such as healthcare, financial services, transportation, and manufacturing. Despite being Intel's first 64-bit chip, the Itanium has floundered in the marketplace; rival AMD has outsold Intel by ten times with its Opteron.

IDC has reported that sales of Itanium-based servers have increased roughly 67 percent in the first quarter of 2005, but overall shipments of the chip have dropped to just 8,125 machines.

HP is hoping to boost those figures with its new line of servers. The NonStop architecture is fault tolerant, containing auxiliary systems intended to keep the servers online with little or no downtime. According to HP, there is 99.99999 percent hardware availability with 100 times more reliability than past systems.

The servers are designed for use in ATM networks and stock exchanges, where computer failure is not an option. If one component within a NonStop server fails, the system has up to two backups that can take over critical tasks.