Compaq Adds Dual-Processor Blades to ProLiant BLs

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard this week announced that it has delivered the first dual-processor blade servers for inclusion in its "QuickBlade" ProLiant BL line. Up until now, HP has only been able to deliver uniprocessor blades in these machines, and the advent of dual-processor blades will, HP hopes, allow the company to expand the use of its blade servers from relatively light infrastructure workloads like print, file, and Web serving to application serving and maybe even lightweight database serving.

Last fall, the Compaq side of the new HP started showing off the QuickBlade machines, which can pack up to 280 of Intel's 700MHz Pentium III low-power chips into a single rack. These machines, which were known as the ProLiant BL e-Class servers and which became commercially available in early 2002, offer a significantly higher number of processors per rack than a conventional two-way, 1U rack server, which can cram 84 processors in a 42U rack. However, due to the relatively low clock speed of these Pentium III chips compared to the 1 GHz chips commonly used in two-way 1U servers, the QuickBlades only offered about twice the compute processing density of regular rack servers.

The new QuickBlade machines using two-processor blades are known as the ProLiant BL p-Class servers, and they use 1.4 GHz Pentium III processors. Each p-Class blade server comes with a single processor and 512 MB of main memory, which can be expanded to 4 GB. The p-Class chassis is a 6U form factor and it can hold eight of these dual processor blade servers and up to 144 GB (two drives) of disk capacity. That works out to 96 processors per 42U rack, incidentally, which works out to still be 60 percent more power than can be crammed into a rack of servers using the dual-processor, 1GHz machines that were popular last year and which still are this year. (The p-Class nonetheless has about 30 percent less aggregate processing power than the e-Class machines per rack.) A p-Class blade server with a single 1.4 GHz Pentium III processor, 512 MB of main memory, an 18 GB disk drive, and integrated peripheral and networking controllers sells costs $2,539. The p-Class chassis with licenses for eight blades to use HP's system management software sells for $2,999. A ProLiant BL e-Class blade server with 512 MB of memory sells for $1,799.

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