HP Unveils Thinner Blade Server

Hewlett-Packard on Monday unveiled a thinner, two-processor blade server that lets users fit more of the high-powered computers in a rack.

With the HP ProLiant BL30p, businesses can fit 16 side-by-side blades in a 10.5-inch space. The server comes with dual Intel Xeon processors and is designed for running application servers, E-commerce applications, computation clusters, grid computing, and Web hosting. For comparison, rival IBM's BladeCenter can handle 14 dual-processor servers in a 12.25-inch chassis. IBM is the current market leader by revenue, followed by HP, according to IDC.

The ProLiant BL30p is scheduled for release in the United States in the second quarter. Pricing was not released.

Also on Monday, HP launched the ProLiant ML110 server for small and midsize businesses. The ML110 is designed for companies looking to buy a server to handle file sharing, Web and mail messaging, and general-purpose functions such as firewalls and virtual private servers.

The ProLiant ML110 is preloaded with Windows Small Business Server, and has a starting price of $499. The product is available with a 2.6-GHz Intel Celeron processor or an Intel Pentium 4 processor running at 2.8 GHz or 3.0 GHz with 1Mbyte of cache. The ML110 also runs the Linux and Netware operating systems.