* HP isn’t the only vendor in town with blade workstations
HP last week announced what it claims is the industry’s first blade workstation.
The HP ProLiant Blade Workstation is based on AMD Opteron processors. It consists of a blade that fits in an enclosure in the data center and communicates with the keyboard, video and mouse located on a user’s desk.
Despite HP’s claims, the ProLiant Blade Workstation is not the first on the market. ClearCube has been selling its PC blades for years. The ClearCube PC Blade uses dual-core Intel Xeon and Pentium processors. HP also has a blade PC, which uses the Transmeta processor.
Like the ProLiant Blade Workstation, which uses dual-core AMD Opteron processors, the ClearCube blades have been used successfully in financial services environments, where traders need to have access to several PCs at once but don’t have the space under their desks for CPUs.
HP says Lloyds TSB in London is using 280 Proliant Blade Workstations on its trading floor. Sagent Advisors, a financial advisory firm, Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston use ClearCube’s blades.
Features of the ProLiant Blade Workstation include support for multiple display and 3D graphics. It runs Microsoft Windows XP Professional and has up to 16GB of RAM and as much as 146GB of internal storage. Eight blade workstations fit in a 6U enclosure.
Pricing for the blade hardware starts at $6,400. The equipment on the client desktop starts at between $600 and $800.
