HP releases latest Integrity blades

The HP Integrity BL870c is an average-sized blade system with big ambitions. It is HP's first four-socket Integrity server blade, which the company claims is more "energy efficient" than the rack-mount equivalent.

The BL870c was launched this week, around a year after the company's first Integrity blade, the HP BL860c. It is a "double-width" c-Class blade, two of which will fit into the Integrity's four-slot housing while four will fit in the eight-slot housing. The server supports a lot of memory, 96GB in a standard housing in comparison to half that on a standard rack-mount.

The HP BL870c will start at £4,700 with one CPU and 8GB of memory, but HP's marketing manager, Peter Hindle, believes a mid-capacity configuration will cost around £20,000.

Hindle said the need to make blade servers as compact as possible, which is their chief appeal, does come at a cost that escalates with higher-capacity devices. "A large capacity in a small unit is [relatively] cheap, but once you start packing memory up, it does start to become an expensive item," he said.

The BL870c supports a range of operating systems including Windows, HP-UX, Open VMS, Red Hat and Suse. HP will also be supporting a range of applications for the new blade system, including Siemens PLM, Websphere, SAP and PeopleSoft.

HP believes the main customers for the device will be companies with standard Integrity servers who want to shift to the more energy-efficient and compact blade version. Other target markets include development environments and business critical applications.