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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - General:
HP Reaches Milestone, Sells 100,000 Blade Servers
HP announced it is the first vendor to sell more than 100,000 blade servers,
retaking the market share lead in the industry's fastest-growing server market
segment.
HP also announced availability of the industry's densest two-processor blade
server -- the HP ProLiant BL30p -- new blade customers, industry-leading
performance benchmarks and product launch details, including both AMD Opteron
processor and Intel Itanium processor-based blade servers.
"No other company has demonstrated a stronger commitment to helping businesses
leverage industry-standard solutions in the increasingly popular blade market
than HP," said James Mouton, vice president, platform division, Industry
Standard Servers for HP. "Beyond the 100,000-unit milestone, HP is uniquely
positioned to offer the systems, software, solutions and services customers
need to best leverage blade architecture in an Adaptive Enterprise."
WhiteCross Systems, a leading business and customer intelligence solutions
provider, was able to save time and money through consolidation of its
existing 1,000 servers -- comprising a mix of Sun and other proprietary
systems -- to roughly 300 HP ProLiant BL20p blades running Red Hat Linux.
"HP blade servers processed information 30 times faster than our existing
proprietary systems -- scanning up to 15 billion rows of data per second,"
said Roger Gaskell, development director at WhiteCross Systems. "This
represented significantly higher performance levels than any of the
competitive solutions which we evaluated."
WhiteCross extracts business-critical information from huge amounts of data to
enable its customers to maximize revenue, minimize customer churn and identify
new products and services. The HP blade server platform will increase the
volume of data that can be processed in a much smaller timescale allowing the
company to be more responsive to its clients' needs.
HP Retakes Top Spot In Worldwide Blade Server Market
According to Gartner market share data for the first calendar quarter of
2004:
- HP again secured the top spot in the worldwide blade server market (revenue
and units shipped).
- In the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) market, HP increased market
share from 42 percent to 64 percent year over year in revenue with growth of
536 percent. The Gartner report found blades to be the fastest growing segment
of the server market. Blade servers are designed to facilitate systems
management and offer customers greater flexibility through scale-out
technology. As the vendor holding the top spot in this dynamic market segment,
HP continues to develop the blade architecture and help customers achieve
greater return on investment through industry-standard platforms.
Double-Dense HP ProLiant Blade Server Now Available
Blades are an integral component of the HP Adaptive Enterprise strategy to
synchronize business and IT to better capitalize on change. Enterprise
customers are increasingly adopting HP blades to lower data center costs and
increase efficiency.
Now available, the HP ProLiant BL30p is the industry's densest two-processor
blade server, providing large business customers a competitive edge by
enabling more processing power per rack. The Intel Xeon processor-based HP
ProLiant BL30p conserves floor space by up to 67 percent and reduces cabling
by up to 96 percent compared to a traditional 1U (1.75-inch) infrastructure.
HP Drives Blade Growth With Virtualization, Linux
HP and VMware offer customers packaged solutions for server virtualization
based on HP ProLiant servers, which include VMware ESX Server, VMware
VirtualCenter and HP Gold or Platinum Support. Now available on HP ProLiant
BL20p blade servers, these solutions allow customers to increase server
utilization, simplify management and lower costs, while at the same time
providing a single point of contact for both hardware and operating system
customer service support.
A key factor in HP ProLiant blade success is the industry-leading management
tools built into every server, further enhanced through tight integration with
partner software, including VMware's.
Building on HP's leading virtualization solutions and the industry's broadest
blade server portfolio, HP offers ProLiant blade servers running Linux. With a
Linux distribution, companies can expect to experience significant cost
savings without compromising on performance or security. For example,
customers migrating from a 48-processor Sun Solaris machine to 24
two-processor HP ProLiant blade servers running Linux using new technology
called "cluster file systems" can create one large server that adds capacity
on demand, scales performance efficiently and provides 100 percent redundancy
and uptime at approximately 30 to 50 percent of the cost.
HP Sets Course For The Future Of Blades
In the second half of 2004, HP plans to introduce an AMD Opteron-based blade
server targeted at enterprise and high-performance computing markets, offering
these customers even greater flexibility and choice.
HP also intends to introduce Itanium-based blade servers, providing customers
with enhanced 64-bit performance and the broadest operating system support in
the industry.
The addition of these new servers will build on the industry's largest
offering of blade platforms, utilizing one-, two-, and four-way processors
from multiple vendors including Intel and AMD.
Customers Get Better Performance With HP Blade Servers
HP continues to drive technological leadership in blade technology,
outperforming all other vendors in important industry benchmarks. Recently,
the HP ProLiant BL20p earned the first ever PeopleSoft Certified Performance
Report on all blade servers and achieved impressive results for the PeopleSoft
Enterprise CRM HelpDesk for HR 8.8 benchmark. Configured with the HP
StorageWorks Modular Smart Array 1000 and running Microsoft Windows Server
2003 and Microsoft SQL Server 2000, the ProLiant BL20p blade server achieved
1,250 users with an average response time of 1.585 seconds.
Additionally, on the Lotus Notes R6iNotes workload, the HP ProLiant BL20p
achieved an industry-wide dual processor blade server price-to-performance
ratio of $10.86 per user (or $12.80/NotesMark). These results represent a 35
percent performance increase over a similarly configured IBM eServer
BladeCenter at less than one third of the cost per user. The R6iNotes workload
was run to simulate 5,500 R6iNotes users against an IBM Lotus Domino 6.5
Server. The test ran seven hours during which the system under test achieved
4,666 NotesMark (transactions per minute) with an average response time of
0.199 seconds.
About HP
HP is a technology solutions provider to consumers, businesses and
institutions globally. The company's offerings span IT infrastructure,
personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and
printing. For the four fiscal quarters ended April 30, HP revenue totaled
$76.8 billion. More information about HP is available at www.hp.com .
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