"Hewlett-Packard has at last taken the the wraps off
its Blade servers. It's a much more ambitious programme than you
might have suspected, encompassing HP's own PA-RISC chips as well
as Intel Pentium IIIs, and the new 'PowerBar' chassis will find its
way into storage and other specialised servers too.
Surprisingly the first offerings will be Linux-only, with
Windows and HP-UX to follow. Red Hat, SuSE and Debian - chalk one
up for HP's Linux advisor, Bruce Perens - are the favoured
distros.
One thing blades aren't is ultra dense. Or even dense. Blade
servers from RLX crammed over 300 CPUs in a small space, with RLX
claiming an eightfold increase in density over today's racks. Not
so with "hp blades servers", as HP styles them (the marketing
department which gave us the "rp8400" moniker a few months ago
still hasn't fixed the shift key)."
