Guild Companies

Hewlett-Packard this week refreshed its ProLiant BL "QuickBlade" line of blade servers, adding faster processors to uniprocessor and two-way blades, as well as adding a new four-way blade that plugs into its existing chassis. HP has beat IBM to market by a few weeks with a four-way blade server, but Egenera has been shipping an exotic blade solution and uniprocessor, two-way, and four-way blade racks, designed with fault tolerance, since last year.

In addition, the bigger QuickBlades now have the option of direct SAN connectivity, which is something that many prospective customers have been asking for. While supporting a few internal IDE or SCSI drives is enough capacity for some Web infrastructure workloads, and similarly network-attached storage (NAS) connections working through Ethernet or Fast Ethernet links yield decent performance, a SAN link based on higher-bandwidth Fibre Channel connections is necessary for customers who want to deploy blades, instead of rack-mounted servers, in order to run real applications and databases. That is why the new ProLiant BL20p G2, which uses two-way blades based on Intel's 2.8 GHz "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP processor, now has a mezzanine card that plugs into the blade that is a Fibre Channel host bus adapter. This is an optional, priced feature, not a requirement. HP says that it will continue to ship BL20p blades using the first generation of the BL20p blades (which were based on 1.4 GHz Pentium III processors) for a while, since some customers have standardized on them and want to roll out identical blades to simplify their lives. The BL20p blades plug into a 6U form factor rack chassis that can house up to eight of the two-way blades, yielding a total of 96 processors per standard 42U rack. A base BL20p with a single 1.4 MHz Pentium III processor, 512 MB of memory (expandable to 4 GB), and an 18 GB disk drive sells for $2,336. HP expects the base BL20p with a single 2.8 GHz Xeon DP processor, 512 MB of memory (expandable to 8 GB), and a 36 GB disk drive to sell for $3,399 when it starts shipping in March. (The Fibre Channel SAN card has not been offered on the older BL20p cards, by the way.)

That Fibre Channel SAN card can also be used in the new four-way ProLiant BL40p blade server, which is based on the 1.5 GHz and 2 GHz "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors from Intel. (The SAN connectivity is not available on the entry BL10e blade servers, however.) The ProLiant BL40p blade server can support up to 12 GB of main memory and support four hot-plug SCSI disk drives, which come in 36, 72, or 144 GB capacities. The base ProLiant BL40p with a single 1.5 GHz Xeon MP processor, 1 GB of memory (expandable to 12 GB), and a 36 GB disk is expected to sell for $8,999. The four-way BL40p blade plugs into the same 6U form factor chassis as the two-way BL20p blade, but it eats up more room. Two BL40ps, or a total of eight processors, fit in each chassis, yielding only 48 processors per rack. That's half as dense as the two-way blades. The four-way blade is also expected to be available in March.

HP has also added a 900 MHz Pentium III Ultra Low Voltage (ULV) processor option to the entry ProLiant BL10e blade server. The original QuickBlades were based on the 700 MHz Pentium III ULV chips, and early last year HP upgraded the clock speed of the chips to 800 MHz and boosted the disk capacity to two 40 GB IDE ATA drives, up from two 30 GB drives per blade. A base BL10e blade with a 900 MHz Pentium III ULV chip, 512 MB of main memory (expandable to 1 GB), and a single 40 GB drive costs $1,759; a ten-blade pack costs $16,710. (HP charged the same price for the 800 MHz blades, and continues to do so.) Up to 20 BL10e blades can fit into the e-Class ProLiant BL chassis, yielding a total of 280 processors per 42U rack.

Hugh Jenkins, vice president of marketing for the Industry Standard Server unit at HP, told me this week that the company had shipped 15,000 blade servers (meaning the count of the blades, not the chassis) since the QuickBlades were launched a year ago. In the third quarter of 2002, HP shipped 10,000 blades, at a rate of 1,800 a month. HP has been able to maintain that ship rate, more or less, according to Jenkins' numbers. While he will not speculate on how 2003 blade server shipments might pan out in 2003, he did say that HP was sticking by its estimates that blade servers will constitute about 20 percent of server shipments in 2005 to 2006. "For a new market, we're extremely pleased with the sales and interest we are getting," he says.