Steve,
> > Are any of the disks not healthy? Do you see any I/O
> errors in dmesg?
>
> In my vmstat report, I it is an average per minute not
> per-second. Also, I found that in the first minute of the
> very first run, the HP's "bi"
> value hits a high of 221184 then it tanks after that.
Based on the difference in I/O wait on the two machines, there's
definitely something up with the disk subsystem on the HP - try checking
the BIOS on the HP 642 - I bet you'll find a disk error lurking there.
- Luke
