Eye on Blades Blog: Trends in Infrastructure : blade servers, BladeSystem

A Blade Thanksgiving

Daniel Bowers — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:21:00 GMT

Thursday is the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, a time when families often get together to give thanks for the things they most appreciate. I snapped this pic inside one of the server development labs at HP; it looks like even the 'extended family'...(read more)

Icosikaitetra-Core Server Blades

Daniel Bowers — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:46:00 GMT

Yesterday, AMD launched "Istanbul" , their six-core Opteron processor. Paul G. promised that HP would add this CPU into our servers in very short order. "Very short" was right; today we've announced the BL465c G6 and BL495c G6...(read more)

Virtually (and literally) #1

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 22 May 2009 13:41:00 GMT

This week we released VMMark results for the new HP BL490c G6 server blade. The scores establish the BL490c as the highest performing 2-socket server blade for virtualization -- eclipsing blades offered by IBM, Dell, and Cisco. By the way, this 2-socket...(read more)

Chargeback Glitch

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:25:00 GMT

Here’s a story about unexpected behavior prompted by some chargeback rules at Pfizer . (By 'chargeback' I mean the budgeting scheme where IT resources are metered, then costs are attributed to the business units that consume them.) Larry Cannell...(read more)

Designing infrastructure the way IT wants to work

Gary Thome — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 07:46:00 GMT

We've been on the Adaptive Infrastructure journey at HP for several years now. This week we are announcing an important milestone: BladeSystem Matrix. We've been really thinking a lot about how customers use IT and ways we can optimize IT infrastructure...(read more)

Yeah, but where do I insert the floppy disk?

Daniel Bowers — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:25:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, lots of server admins started deploying the new HP BL460c G6 server blade. Coincidentally, this year is the 20th anniversary of the Compaq SystemPro 386/33 -- the first "PC server" (to use the 1989 throw-back term for...(read more)

Did we miss something?

Gary Thome — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 21:35:00 GMT

Every time a competitor introduces a new major product we can't help but notice they suddenly get very interested in what HP is blogging during the weeks prior to their announcement. Then when they announce, the story is always a big self-congratulatory "we've figured out what the problem is with existing server/blade architectures". The implication being that blades volume adoption is somehow being constrained by the very thing they have. ...(read more)

9 Trends in 2009: What's Hot and What's Not in the Data Center

newtonja — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:30:00 GMT

We can’t let Illuminata, Gartner, IDC and Forrester have all the fun, so we sat down and came up with our own What’s Hot and What’s Not in the Data Center list for 2009. Read on for the top 9 things in '09 plus the runner-ups that just missed the list. If you don't see your hot button in 2009 here, let us here about it!...(read more)

BladeSystem Supercomputers

Gary Thome — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:34:00 GMT

The latest Top 500 supercomputer list just got released. BladeSystem c-Class was well represented once again. With 201 entries (40.2%) of the top 500, it has the most entries of any product line. The ever popular ProLiant BL460c made up the most entries...(read more)

10Gb Ethernet: Divide and Conquer with Virtual Connect Flex-10

Gary Thome — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:53:00 GMT

Moore's law has usually been used to predict general trends in semiconductors. While not exactly a perfect analogy, we have seen trends in interconnect bandwidth increase. Ethernet has seen bandwidth increase ten-fold every few years, with the latest transition to 10Gb. Usually these transitions take a while because the costs to transition are high, and the transition to 10Gb has followed that trajectory - until now. ...(read more)

When is choice not choice?

Gary Thome — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:36:00 GMT

Following on the heels of our virtualization launch last week, Dell made a virtualization announcement of their own yesterday. They announced a variety of third party products they now support and re-announced the blades servers they introduced last week, but this time referring to their virtualization design. Curiously they compared their two-socket M805 full-height 16-DIMM blade to our four-socket blades, ignoring our two-socket half-height 16-DIMM ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade announced last week. I guess comparing their blade against an HP blade that is half the size wouldn't have sounded as good. ...(read more)

One million and counting

Gary Thome — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:16:00 GMT

1,000,000. One million. 106. No matter how you write it, that is a big number. I’ve never tried to count to one million. But now we have sold our millionth blade server; which is cause for reflection....(read more)