HP blade server gets dense

HP  next quarter is expected to begin shipping a two-processor Xeon blade that is half the size of its current offerings, giving business users who need minimal on-system storage the ability to pack more processing power into smaller spaces.

HP unveiled last week the BL30p, along with a single-processor tower system for small and midsize businesses. The ML110, priced starting at $499, is the first in a line of ML100 series systems. It is expected to be a complement to the rack-mounted, single-processor DL140  that HP introduced last year, says Jim Mouton, HP's vice president of platform strategy.

The no-frills ML110 is designed for general-purpose tasks such as file sharing and mail messaging. It is available with either a 2.6-GHz Celeron processor or 2.8-GHz or 3-GHz Pentium 4 processors from Intel with 1M-byte cache.

The BL30p is aimed at giving business users more density and power, primarily for computational clusters and grid computing. Sixteen of the blades can fit into HP's 6U blade enclosure, compared with just eight of HP's dual-processor blade offering, the BL20p. By contrast, 14 of IBM's dual processor HS20 blades can fit into its 7U blade enclosure.

The Greater Baltimore Medical Center last year replaced three racks of servers with one rack of nearly three dozen BL20p blade servers. Eric French, network manager at the medical center, says he's interested in taking a look at the even more compact BL30p.

"The more processing power per square foot the better your data center is in terms of the expense," French says. He says the new blades would work nicely as Web servers or Linux clusters.

Two BL30ps can slide into a sleeve that lets them plug into the same backplane as the BL20p, letting the systems be interchangeable and enables an easier migration, Mouton says.

To slim down the blade, HP removed the two hot-plug SCSI drives available on the BL20p. The BL30p offers optional dual-port Fibre Channel for storage-area network connectivity.

Mouton says HP wants to address a range of compute needs as businesses make blade servers a more important piece of their data center infrastructures.

The blade market is steadily growing. According to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker and Forecaster, about 185,000 blade servers were shipped last year, but nearly 500,000 are expected to ship this year. IDC expects blade server shipments to reach nearly 2.3 million in 2007.

Pricing for the BL30p has not been released, but Mouton says it will be "very comparable to the BL20p ." Both systems are available with the latest Xeon processors. Pricing for the BL20p, with two 3.06-GHz Xeon processors, starts at about $5,000.