Regardless of how blade servers are used, the market is booming -- market research firm IDC recently predicted the blade server market will hit $3.7 billion by 2006 and climb to $6 billion by 2007. In addition to H-P, the Tatung Company and 3UP Systems also unveiled new Xeon-based blade server products this week.
In announcing the latest members of its ProLiant family, H-P noted that it has sold more than 500,000 ProLiant Essentials software licenses. At the same time, H-P announced a $499 low-cost blade server called the ML 110. The machine is available in models using the Intel Celeron at 2.6 gigahertz or the Intel Pentium at 2.8 gigahertz.
The H-P BL30p is aimed at the broad enterprise market for applications in Web hosting, e-commerce and grid and computational clusters. H-P said the device is optimized for compute density with minimal or no local storage, although it can have connections with SAN implementations.
The BL30p fits into H-P's broad server portfolio which in addition to the Xeon includes Intel's Itanium and AMD's Opteron families as foundation processors. "H-P is more-or-less agnostic (in servers)," says Brookwood. "It's well-positioned whichever way the market goes -- Itanium, Opteron or Xeon."
Brookwood believes the server and processor world will see more H-P software coming for the Itanium in the future. He expects more robust H-P Unix software to be developed for the Itanium in coming months in a demonstration of Intel's deep commitment to the powerful 64-bit processor.
