HP Unveils Thinner Blade Server

Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday unveiled a thinner, two-processor blade server that enables enterprises to fit more of the high-powered computers in a rack.

With the HP ProLiant BL30p, enterprises can fit 16 side-by-side blades in a 10.5-inch space. The server comes with dual Intel Xeon processors and is designed for running application servers, e-commerce applications, computation clusters, grid computing and web hosting.

For comparison, rival IBM's BladeCenter can handle 14 dual-processor servers in a 12.25-inch chassis. IBM is the current market leader by revenue, followed by HP, according to International Data Corp.

The HP ProLiant BL30p is scheduled for release in the U.S. in the second quarter. Pricing was not released.

Also on Monday, HP launched the ProLiant ML110 server for the small and medium-size business market. The new product is designed for companies looking to buy a server to handle file sharing, web and mail messaging and general-purpose functions, such as firewalls and virtual private servers.The HP ProLiant ML110 server is pre-loaded with Windows Small Business Server, and has a starting price of $499. The product is available with an Intel Celeron processor at 2.6 gigahertz or an Intel Pentium 4 processor at 2.8 GHz or 3.0 GHz with 1-megabyte cache. The server also runs the Linux and Netware operating systems.