Experton Group Weekly IT News

Hewlett-Packard has a new Blade, Cloud, and Security Strategy

By: Jerald Murphy

Officials from Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) recently announced its new strategy for blade servers, which are designed to compete against a similar offering recently announced by IBM Corp. HP's strategy also increases its emphasis on security elements, with data center design and implementation services as part of a broader set of capabilities.

Focal Points:

• HP executives said that it had started a new initiative for cloud computing. The focus of this initiative is to help companies build their own "mini-cloud" data centers. HP intends to provide both products and services to help companies build these data centers. HP has recently strengthened its ability to offer complete data center design services with its acquisition in January 2008 of EYP Mission Critical. Three use cases HP is targeting with these new dense systems are high performance computing (HPC), massive data center scale out, and Web 2.0/social networks.
• Officials further stated that part of this initiative is to find as many places as possible that it makes sense for business to use blade servers. This is part of what HP is calling its "blades everywhere" strategy. A result of HP's focus on blades has resulted in an increase of its blade sales of 53 percent from last year. Part of the reason vendors like blade servers is that they must be put in blade chassis, which are proprietary in nature. This gives companies a certain amount of "lock-in" when purchasing a chassis. Experton Group believes chassis (and the blades put in them) will remain proprietary for at least the next five years, since fundamental design differences and the search for competitive differentiation will prevent server vendors from developing interoperable blades.
• One of the advantages of blades from a power and cooling standpoint is that they are easier to cool. Their vertical implementation allows heat to be dissipated more efficiently. HP's ProLiant BL2x220c G5 can fit in both the c7000 as well as the smaller c3000 chassis. The c7000 can hold up to 32 G5 blades, where the c3000 is capable of handling 16. Each blade can hold up to four Intel Xeon 5400 quad core processors. Officials said the chips are put on the board in such a way as to prevent overheating. Officials further said these new blades will allow double the compute capacity, without a concomitant rise in power consumption. The BL2x220c G5 blades will start at $6,349.

Experton Group believes server vendors will increase their emphasis on energy efficiency as they try to get companies to adopt new blade center systems. While it may appear as a huge lock in to use blades, Experton Group finds that the purchase value is met when a chassis has six blades in it. For large companies with hundreds and thousands of servers, the single chassis "lock-in" does not in practice "stick" a company with a single blade system vendor. For this reason, Experton Group believes companies still have the ability to evaluate different blade system vendors, and should not feel the purchase of some set of blade chassis prevents further competitive bids and purchasing. While blades can be cooled efficiently, their increased density will often prevent using them through a full rack, so IT managers must carefully plan power distribution and cooling for large scale blade deployments.