HP recently made two advances in blade technology with the introduction of an Itanium-based blade server and an AMD Athlon-based blade PC.

HP last week introduced the HP Integrity BL60p blade server, the first blade server to use Intel's Itanium 2 processor. It is also HP's first blade to run the HP-UX 11i operating system. The server also runs Linux and Microsoft Windows and is designed for customers with business-critical applications.

According to HP's claims, the BL60p outperforms IBM's PowerPC-based JS20 blade by 60% on SPEC benchmarks.

The BL60p is managed by HP Systems Insight Manager, which is also used to manage HP's other blade servers and is the single point of control for managing and monitoring the applications and operations of the blade. The BL60p can be partitioned to run as many as six instances of HP-UX.

HP, which is second in the blade server market to IBM, also introduced a blade PC. The company has been shipping blade PCs for about a year but hasn't seen much traction in the market because its blade PC uses a low-power Transmeta chip set. The new blade PC, the HP BC1500 Blade PC uses an AMD Athlon/64 1500+ processor. The company presently competes with ClearCube in this area.

HP says the blade PC will do particularly well in financial and healthcare industries, as well as other like industries where the security of data is important.

The blade PC ships with 512M bytes of RAM expandable up to 2G bytes.

The use of AMD's Athlon processor in the blade PC should increase HP's chances of deploying such devices more widely than when the company used Transmeta's Crusoe processor. In March, Transmeta announced plans to cease production of all but a few of its low-power processors, shifting its focus to building new businesses around engineering services and intellectual property licensing.

The use of AMD's processor also gives HP the ability to deliver a low-cost - less than $1,000 per node - desktop platform for customers. The HP BC1500 Blade PC has a 40G-byte hard drive and uses either HP's or Citrix's thin client technology. The HP BC1500 Blade PC is available now.
 
HP claims that 20 customers have deployed the HP BC1500 blade. The blade is managed by HP's System Insight Manager and as many as 280 blades can be deployed in a single 19-inch rack.