HP claims breakthrough in blade design

Stan Beer
Thursday, 15 June 2006 09:57

Business IT - Technology

Hewlett-Packard has unveiled what it claims is a breakthrough blade architecture that can save customers millions of dollars as they build out their data centers.

Purportedly taking three years of development, the HP BladeSystem c-Class claims innovations in virtualization, power and cooling, and system management capabilities that can reduce both operational and capital expenditure costs by 46% in a typical data center implementation.

The new HP BladeSystem enables users to wire computing resources once and change them on the fly, dynamically adjust power and cooling to reduce energy consumption, and increase administrative productivity up to tenfold, according to HP.

The new HP blade product is also modular, which HP says will enable businesses of any size to start with HP ProLiant and Integrity servers, HP StorageWorks storage offerings as well as client blades and then flexibly add applications and third-party products to expand their data centers as needed.

According to HP, with the new design, an average enterprise data center can realize over a three-year period: system acquisition cost savings of up to 41%; data center facilities cost savings of up to 60%; and initial system setup time cost savings of up to 96%.

“The HP BladeSystem c-Class portfolio leverages the best technologies across HP – from NonStop servers to printers – and brings them together to fundamentally improve how our customers buy, build, manage and use their computing resources,” said Ann Livermore, executive vice president, Technology Solutions Group, HP. “By implementing a simple, ‘out-of-the-box’ design, customers can dramatically reduce the biggest IT cost drivers and barriers to change in today’s racked, stacked and wired data centers.”