HP today broadened its blade server industry leadership with new technologies, benchmarks and new alliance partners. HP has shipped more than 50,000 industry-standard HP ProLiant blade servers to a wide range of customers across multiple industries. To date, HP has sold more blade servers than any other major vendor in what industry analysts see as the fastest growing segment of the server market.

HP extended its blade technology leadership with the availability of the fastest Intel(R) Xeon(TM) DP processors in the ProLiant BL20p blade server and achieved top performance benchmarks with both the ProLiant BL20p and ProLiant BL40p blade servers. Also, extending both capabilities and choice, two new software partners have joined the HP Blade Alliance Program: VMware, which supports virtualization capabilities for HP ProLiant servers, and enterprise shared data clustering provider PolyServe.

HP continues to expand its reach in the blade market; recent customer wins include AgResearch, Hostopia and Telecomputing ASA. HP ProLiant BL blade servers enhance IT systems control, increase flexibility, lower costs and improve efficiency.

"We chose HP because of their advanced understanding of our business, both from a commercial and scientific perspective," said Dr. Philip Lindsay, chief information officer, AgResearch. "They are committed to providing a system that meets our needs for flexibility, speed and simplicity. With these new blade servers and second generation SAN we are confident that we can be more cost-effective and commercialize our gene discoveries sooner."

The upgraded dual-processor HP ProLiant BL20p server now offers 3.2-GHz Xeon DP processors with 1 MB L3 cache, supporting up to 8 GB of PC 2100 DDR memory and an embedded Smart Array 5i array controller and gigabit NICs standard. The upgraded ProLiant BL20p also supports a new input/output cable with two USB ports, one video port, one iLO (integrated lights out) port and one kernel debug port specifically designed to aid in initial server management deployment.

"Customers want to lean on a trusted and established technology partner that not only provides a well-integrated blade solution, but also understands the rest of their computing needs," said James Mouton, vice president, platforms, Industry Standard Servers, HP. "HP offers the broadest portfolio of blade servers and technologies and is dedicated to helping customers use these tools to achieve their business objectives."

Performance excellence on blades

Demonstrating the performance that innovative technology can deliver, the next-generation ProLiant BL20p server achieved the best two-way two-tier results on the SAP(R) Sales and Distribution (SD) Standard Application Benchmark.(1) The HP ProLiant BL20p outperformed the IBM eServer BladeCenter HS20,(2) the Dell PowerEdge 2650(3) and the Fujitsu Siemens PRIMERGY TX200.(4) The HP ProLiant BL20p system supported 329 SAP SD Benchmark users with the fastest average response time of 1.99 seconds.

HP also posted an industry-leading blade benchmark on SPECweb99_SSL on a HP ProLiant BL20p configuration with two Intel 3.06-GHz Xeon DP processors with 1 MB L3 cache, 8 GB of memory, and an embedded Smart Array 5i+ array controller. HP is the blade performance leader, with a 2.7 percent advantage over competing blades.

A second SPECweb99 SSL performance benchmark was achieved on an HP ProLiant BL40p running two Intel 2.8-GHz Xeon MP processors with 2 MB L3 cache, 12 GB of memory, four embedded NC7781 gigabit NICs and an embedded Smart Array 5i+ array controller. The Smart Array 5i+ and the embedded gigabit NICs are standard features on the ProLiant BL40p. With this result, the ProLiant BL40p is the performance leader for blade servers.

Pricing and availability

The HP ProLiant BL20p with two Intel 3.2-GHz Xeon DP processors with 1M L3 cache is available immediately at a U.S. list price starting at $5,309.(5)