Hewlett Packard (HP) Wednesday introduced the latest addition to its c-Class BladeSystem portfolio designed to handle memory-intensive data center workloads while helping businesses lower cost, save energy and space, and decrease deployment time.
The HP Integrity BL870c-- which builds on the strength of its first c-Class Integrity blade, the BL860c-- is embedded with virtualization, management and energy efficient capabilities and offers twice the processing power and twice the memory capacity as the BL860c.
These capabilities, according to Gregory Lister, Marketing Manager, Business Critical Systems, Hewlett-Packard Asia Pacific and Japan, is ideal for organisations struggling to handle memory-intensive data center workloads, running mission critical, “always-on” applications such as High Performance Computing and ERP applications.
Packaged as “the first four-socket server blade that combines the modular infrastructure and energy efficiency of HP BladeSystem with the business-critical capabilities of Integrity servers”, the HP Integrity BL870c is said to address more application workload demands by expanding the Integrity server blade portfolio for the HP BladeSystem c3000 and c7000 enclosures.
The addition of the BL870c to the HP BladeSystem family will now allow businesses to deploy and manage Integrity or ProLiant servers in a single blade enclosure with a set of common management tools.
Its energy efficient capabilities help businesses realise power savings up to 25 percent. Space requirements are also reduced because 2.5 times as many BL870c server blades fit into the same space as a comparable rackmount configuration.
Its Virtual Server Environment infrastructure allows a “wire once virtual connect” which, as the term suggests, only requires one wire to plug in the system thus eradicating the need for multiple cables which decreases deployment time and cuts the time of IT maintenance tasks from 50% to 90% . This allows the organisation to optimize its resource utilization in other areas that need attention.
The HP Integrity BL870c is the second server that was designed and developed by the research and development team in Singapore, the first being the HP Integrity rx2660. It runs on Microsoft Windows, HP-UX 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3, OpenVMS, RedHat or SuSE operating systems.
To help take the guesswork out of building an Integrity blade solution, HP also announced alongside this product launch that it has created Solution Blocks for its Integrity servers. These HP-tested configurations allow customers and resellers to quickly deploy business critical applications on the HP BladeSystem.
HP Solution Blocks for Integrity server blades simplify the deployment of enterprise applications and optimize the use of the HP BladeSystem enclosure to save time and money. Each Solution Block includes combinations of Integrity blades, application software, HP storage and interconnect technology – all HP-approved based on best practices or testing.
Initial Solution Blocks available for Integrity blades include enterprise resource planning (ERP), service-oriented architecture (SOA), application integration and product data management.
Lister told SDA Asia in a phone briefing that he sees the HP Integrity BL870c playing in the enterprise market and in the commercial small and medium business space.
Both HP and IBM lead the blade server market with Sun and Dell trailing behind. According to IDC, in the x86 blade server segment, HP has been ranked as the No. 1 vendor in unit shipments for 3 consecutive quarters (CYQ1, 2007 to CYQ3, 2007) in Asia/Pacific (inc. Japan), capturing 38.7 percent market share and recording a year-on-year growth of 106.6 percent.
The HP Integrity BL870c server blade and Solution Blocks for Integrity server blades are currently available with pricing for the BL870c starting at just under 8,000 dollars.
Pricing for the Solution Blocks for Integrity server blades is available through HP and its channel partners, and varies based on the configuration. |
