Hewlett-Packard Co. on Monday will announce two new ProLiant servers, including a new US$499 system designed for small- to medium-sized business (SMB) customers.
The SMB server will be the first of the company’s new ML100 line of SMB systems. Called the ML110, it will be a single-processor “tower” shaped server with a starting list price of US$499. It will ship with either a 2.6GHz Celeron processor or the 2.8GHz or 3.0GHz Pentium 4 from Intel Corp.
On Monday, HP will also announce plans to release the slimmest member of its BL line of blade servers. Called the BL30p, the new blade is designed to fit into the same chassis as HP’s BL20p and BL40p blades. The BL30p is half as thick as a BL20p blade, and it uses a newly designed “sleeve” mechanism that lets two BL30p units plug into the interconnects used by one BL20p.
Blade servers are extremely dense, slimmed-down systems. Like books in a bookshelf, they slide into a chassis that provides power and networking. They are designed to be an easy to manage system for server farms or supercomputers To make the BL30p smaller, it will include only one Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) hard drive, unlike the BL20p, which has two Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) drives. Customers will be able to fit 16 of the BL30p blades into HP’s standard BL p-class blade enclosure.
Both the BL30p and the ML110 will support the Linux and Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating systems. The ML110, which will be available as of Monday, will also support Novell Inc.’s NetWare OS.
HP did not have pricing or specifications for the BL30p, which will begin shipping by the end of June.
