"Hewlett-Packard, meanwhile, took note of the failures
and has been at work on its blade offerings, but with an
open-standards approach (CompactPCI). The CompactPCI standard was
developed by a consortium of more than 700 companies to increase
availability and reduce computing costs.
Today, HP announced that it is the first to market among the
giant server makers with Intel server blades for Red Hat, SuSe and
Debian Linux. PA-RISC-processor blades are due next year, to be
followed by Itanium-based blades in 2003. Server blades for
Windows, HP-UX and other Linux distributions are due throughout
next year. The initial Web server blades will handle Web hosting,
Web caching and Web streaming media.
HP also announces storage blades (dual IDE disk blade), network
blades (gigabit Ethernet) and management blades (HP TopTools and
OpenView). Volume shipments on all blades will begin in January,
and HP said it anticipates blade releases throughout 2002."
