Building on the launch of its first blade servers at the beginning of this year, HP has come to market with a combined family of blade solutions which addresses computing needs across enterprise data centre, service provider and telco environments.
Blade servers are essentially `computers on a board` - comprehensive computing systems that include processor, memory, network connections, and associated electronics, all on a single motherboard called a `blade`.
The server blade - along with storage, networking and other blades - are typically installed in a rack-mountable enclosure that houses multiple blades; these all share common resources such as cabling, power supplies and cooling fans. With its modular, hot-pluggable architecture, the easily accessible blade server offers increased computing density while ensuring both maximum scalability and ease of management.
As far as today`s announcements are concerned, they mark the release of the HP Server BH and the HP ProLiant BL server blade product lines - products which reflect the integration of offerings following HP`s recently-completed merger with Compaq.
"We see the fledgling blade server segment becoming a massive high-volume market in the near future - in fact it`s expected to grow from $50 million this year to $3.7 billion by 2006, according to the latest server market forecast from IDC," says Gaf Khan, the business critical systems manager for Africa at HP.
"This makes sense - after all, the high-density technology addresses the current trend among large computing centres to reduce space requirements while lowering their total cost of ownership and getting a higher return on their IT investments. This is particularly important in Africa where budgets are limited and space constraints tight."
The HP Server BH blade product line has been designed specifically to meet the needs of telco and service provider customers. Its platform architecture takes advantage of existing telco and network equipment industry standards such as CompactPCI (cPCI) and NEBS, which are designed for business-critical applications.
The HP ProLiant BL blade product line meets the needs of corporate data centre and service provider environments for multi-tiered applications, clustering and databases. It uses enterprise standards in the areas of network and storage connectivity and management, and is designed to be space-saving and easy to deploy.
"Taken together, we believe our blade servers offer the broadest operating system and application support. Current and future OS support will include Windows 2000, .NET, several versions of Linux and HP-UX," says Khan.
HP is also offering the Blade Server Alliance Programme, a means of ensuring that third-party applications and hardware interoperate with the HP blade servers. And, naturally, the company is taking the lead in IT services by helping customers plan, deploy and administer blade servers to achieve increased business value from their IT investments.
Both the HP Server BH and ProLiant BL Server blade product lines are currently shipping across Africa through HP`s network of authorised distributors and resellers.
"In the future, we plan to deliver the next generation of blades, including dual- and quad-processor server blades using Pentium III, Pentium 4, Xeon, PA-RISC and Itanium-based processors," says Khan. "Other blades providing access to SCSI and Fibre Channel storage, as well as high-speed networking, are also expected to be offered."
For more information on HP`s solutions and activities in Africa, surf to www.hp.com/africa.
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