Could be good for HP.
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
December 3, 2001, 8:45 p.m. PT
news.cnet.com
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. |
