HP is the leader in blade server shipments world wide and, with the announcement on September 2, 2008 of a new server blade offering, is clearly intent on maintaining that position. However, the marketing message delivered with the ProLiant BL495c G5processor blade may confuse some enterprise IT staff. The focus is virtualization but so many of the features of this server support stand-alone operations (one-server/one-application) that the benefits may be hidden.
Good Specs
The BL495c is based on dual-socket quad-core AMD Opteron 2300 processors. With up to 128GB of RAM and two 10Gb Ethernet ports the server can support a minimum of 32 virtual machines. One of the key talking points for this unit is the large amount of RAM available for distribution to virtualized applications and operating systems. The 10Gb Ethernet ports are aimed at eliminating networking bottlenecks that can occur when multiple high I/O applications are running simultaneously on the server. For the moment this processor blade holds the lead in virtualization capabilities against the competition that includes Dell, IBM and Sun.