HP on Monday is releasing the first blade server version of its NonStop computer, a highly fault-tolerant system designed to compete with IBM’s mainframe.

HP is also trying to steal some thunder from IBM with an interesting proposition. For customers willing to junk a mainframe application, HP is offering its new Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem “at no charge [with] a full year of NonStop platform software.”

Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice dismissed the trade-in offer as “marketing bravado” and “juvenile.” But HP’s NonStop, based on Intel Itanium processors, can certainly compete with the IBM mainframe, Eunice says.

“It’s a strong product. I’m not going to read too much into fisticuffs with IBM,” Eunice says. “At the end of the day, there aren’t many system architectures that can do six, seven or eight ‘nines’ of reliability. If you’re serious about vast uptime and never, ever going down, as good as Unix has become … it doesn’t have the decades of experience with the kind of reliability that mainframes and NonStop do.”

NonStop, on the market since the late 1980s, has moved toward using more common components over the last several years, a shift that brings both price and management benefits to customers, Eunice says. IT management is easier when there are fewer unique or proprietary technologies within a system, he notes. “You get a better chance to reuse your systems administration skills,” he says.

Practically all the hardware, from the memory chips and processors to the disk drives, are industry-standard parts used in other systems.

Moving to a blade architecture takes this one step further. A modular system allowing customers to take blades in and out at will is easier to upgrade and repair, he says. (Compare blade server products.)

HP boasted about upgraded performance. This is the biggest NonStop overhaul in three years, and HP has doubled the performance in half the amount of space. Instead of needing two standard 42U racks to house eight processors, a customer can put eight dual-core blades in one rack and get twice the performance.

While previous HP NonStop systems cost $380,000 and up, this one starts at $340,000, HP executives say. It’s available now.

“We’re able to leverage the blade form factor and drive lots and lots of the hardware costs out of the system,” says Randy Meyer, director of NonStop product management strategy and technology.