Hewlett-Packard has taken its blade servers to the next level by
adding multiprocessor capabilities to the former Compaq Proliant BL
range, writes Eric Doyle.
Blades, highly compact, low-power, low heat-producing servers, were
introduced by Compaq last year as a new category of server ideally
suited to high-density server farms, such as large-scale, clustered
Web hosting facilities, where space is limited.
With the take-over of Compaq, HP has now taken control of the
development of the systems and the HP Proliant BL 20p is the first
new product in the renamed line.
The Proliant blade can carry two Intel Pentium III processors
backed by up to 4Gbytes of memory and two hot-plug SCSI drives
giving 144Gbytes of storage.
The server is designed for high availability with redundant network
interface cards and an integrated Raid controller sporting a
battery-backed write cache.
HP's integrated lights-out technology provides blade management
which can access the server remotely, even if the operating system
is not functioning. Replacing or fitting a blade into the specially
designed enclosure, which provides the interlinking bus between
multiple blades, involves sliding out the old blade and pushing in
the new one, the company said.
HP's product was preceded by Dell's launch of blade servers. It
also comes in the month when IBM will launch into the blade market
with products first announced earlier this year, followed by Sun
Microsystems' expected announcement of its entry into the low-cost
blade market, which aims to please the company's strong following
in the Internet service provider market.
Iain Stephen, UK ISS director for HP, said, "While most of our
competitors are just now beginning to introduce blade offerings, HP
has already begun the second phase of delivering comprehensive
blade systems, from Proliant BL e-Class low-voltage blades for
front-end applications to more advanced Proliant BL p-Class dual-
and, eventually, four-processor performance blades for mid-tier and
back-end applications."
Richard Fichera, analyst at the Giga Information Group, does not
share Stephen's optimistic view of HP's achievement.
"IBM's server blades are the highest-performance dual-CPU blades
announced to date by a major supplier," he said. "They are
targeted, as are competitors Dell and HP, at the mid-tier of the
enterprise application stack, as opposed to being targeted at
low-power edge services."
IBM has already topped HP's offering by basing its servers on Intel
Xeon-DP processors with support for up to 8Gbytes of memory.
The use of the Serverworks Grand Champion LE chipset should offer
similar performance to many two-way Xeon-DP rack-mount servers,
Fichera claimed.