And the hits just keep on cummin':
HP debuts super-skinny servers
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
December 3, 2001, 8:45 p.m. PT
By piggybacking on an existing standard from telecommunications companies, Hewlett-Packard will beat its big-name competitors to the market with super-thin "bladed" servers.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company is taking orders now for the systems code-named PowerBar, with volume shipments by early January. The company built the systems around the CompactPCI technology, an existing standard widely used in the telecommunications industry to pack numerous servers into as little space as possible.
Bladed servers stack numerous independent lower-end servers within a single cabinet, vertically like books in a bookshelf or horizontally like plates in a cupboard. By comparison, most of today's low-end servers have only a single computer in one enclosure. The smallest common designs are shaped like pizza boxes, 1.75 inches thick and 19 inches wide, but stacking these by the dozen into racks results in a nightmarish profusion of cables sprouting from the backs of the systems.
HP's blade systems combine within a single cabinet several types of blades--some for processing, some for storage and some for networking. A system with 16 processor blades and 16 storage and input-output blades costs about $45,000, said Brian Cox, entry-level server marketing manager and Lin Nease, chief technologist for the Intel server line at HP.
The initial models will ship with Linux from Red Hat, SuSE and Debian, HP said. Windows support is planned for the first half of 2002 and support of other editions of Linux is planned for the second half.
The HP systems expected to be announced Tuesday don't use the latest technology, but rather the older "Coppermine" Pentium III CPU and 440GX chipset to hook the CPU to memory and other subsystems.
Future systems will be more sophisticated, with dual-processor models using the newer "Tualatin" line from Intel and systems using HP's PA-RISC chip coming by mid-year.
In 2003, servers with two servers on a single board are expected, Nease...
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