Hewlett-Packard Co. is beefing up its Integrity BladeSystems with a new model released this week that’s intended to handle memory and CPU intensive applications, such as databases.
HP’s BL870c allows two separate blades, each with a two-socket CPU, to work as one four-socket blade, said James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. The system, which uses Itanium 9100 dual-core processors, can also support up to 96GB of memory.
“They are not saying blades are just for the low end, this is a major step forward for them,” Staten said of HP’s new system. The system will allow companies to take relatively large databases, ERP systems and business intelligence applications and move them to a blade.
While this blade system has more power, it won’t necessarily replace a rack system, Staten said. Racks have more capability and support, for instance, and terabytes of memory.
The system, which supports Windows, HP-UX, OpenVMS, RedHat or SuSE Linux operating systems, is available and pricing begins at US$8,000.
