HP Upgrades Blade Servers, Intros New Gigabit Blade Switch

The company's ProLiant BL10e blade server is now available with 400-MHz front side bus, and supports the ULV (Ultra-Low Voltage) Pentium M processor and PC2100 266-MHz DDR memory, said Sally Stevens, director of marketing for the blade servers. With one processor, a 40-Gbyte 5,400-rpm hard drive, 512 Mbytes of PC2100 DDR memory, a and two Ethernet ports, the blade is priced at $1,759.

The ProLiant BL20p is now available with a 3.06-GHz Xeon processor and a 533-MHz front side bus, Stevens said. It is priced at $5,499, including two 3.06-GHz processors, 1 Gbyte of PC2100 DDR memory, and no hard drives.

Also new is an upgraded version of the ProLiant BL40p with either 2.8-GHz or 2.0-GHz Xeon MP support, Stevens said. List price is $8,199 with one 2.0-GHz Xeon MP processor and 512 Mbytes of PC2100 DDR memory. With two 2.8-GHz processors and 1 Gbyte of memory, the price is $17,229.

HP also introduced the ProLiant BL GbE2 interconnect switch, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch developed with technology from Nortel Networks, said Stevens. The company plans to unveil a 10-Gigabit Ethernet blade switch late next year, with shipment expected in 2005, she said. That switch is expected to be available in September.

HP has already shipped over 30,000 blade servers worldwide, with the vast majority going through the channel, said Hugh Jenkins, vice president of marketing for the company's industry standard servers.