HP: Everything can be bladed

In the battle for the blade server market, it seems the gloves are off. HP announced the launch of a brand new blade system on Tuesday which it hopes will give it the edge in this increasingly competitive market.

Blades are one of the fastest growing sectors in IT. Offering plenty of computing power in a small format using industry standard Intel and AMD processors, blades offer IT managers simplicity and the possibility of making savings in areas like power and cooling.

The latest HP BladeSystem c-Class servers, according to HP, are packed with innovations that offer savings of 41 percent in the cost of server acquisition, 60 percent in data centre facilities costs and 96 percent in the initial set-up costs.

HP bases its claims on issues like cooling (the blades use low-power processors and an innovative, variable speed, temperature controlled thermo-logic system), power consumption (the boards have an environmental control system that minimises power consumption) and completely new systems management software.

To find out more, ZDNet UK talked to the man behind HP's blade strategy, vice-president and general manager for HP BladeSystem, Rick Becker.

Q: What’s different about the blade system your announcing today?
Becker: We have integrated a lot more into the architecture than the products we were delivering today. We are doing a lot to help customers measure power and cooling and once we can measure it, we can manage it. Once we can manage it, we can automate it. We now have instrumentation across the chassis and we have instrumentation in the blades.We know that many components are not manageable, but our belief is that once you instrument them, they will be.

Isn’t Insight Control (HP's system's management suite) already doing this?
Insight Control will enable our customers to set an energy envelope for the chassis or the rack automatically and bring in that resource as you need it. We will continue that innovation over the next twenty years. When I look at my R&D budget around power and cooling, automation and virtualisation we can do that.

So what about integration with business processes?
Well that’s Openview. That is absolutely a key component in this.

How does this fit in with the Adaptive Enterprise strategy?
We designed the BladeSystem c-Class from the ground up, knowing that as our customers deploy the Adaptive Enterprise that they were going to be doing so in a heterogeneous environment. They are not going to have “lights out”, automated computing across their whole IT deployment on day 1. So as we deliver the Adaptive Infrastructure, it has to be extensible.

So when we talk about Insight Control, that’s very specific to HP blade system but is integrated into the same console as Systems Insight Manager, Insight Manager manages blade systems, ProLiant and Integrity servers and StorageWorks - - it’s the only solution in the industry that is delivered on one console to manage your whole data centre.

It’s not as commonly known as it should be, but Systems Insight Manager manages any technology based on standards. So it they are using one of my competitor’s servers or storage devices … Insight Manager will manage that.
So today we already have a heterogeneous management console and what we are doing it delivering to that a brand new lights out capability.

So how does this stand against IBM?
Well I have shown you IBM’s blade servers today and I have shown you ours. It’s confusing to me how customers can deploy enterprise solutions without hot-plug drives, how they can support emerging technology with only four dimm, how they support a system that doesn’t have fully buffered dimm, and so on. My customers don’t have make those trades. And I have automated the processes. You can physically move from IBM blades to us at a mouse click.