Compaq wields blades
Published: 12 Dec 2001 07:31 GMT
Compaq is to ship a new range of blade servers early next year and has revealed details of new software designed to make the systems easy to manage.
Compaq will market the servers under the ProLiant BL brand. One model is a 5.25in-high, or 3U, cabinet containing 14 blades arranged like books on a shelf.
A high-end, 6U model will hold two-processor blades, commented Mary McDowell, general manager of Compaq's Intel server group.
Compaq also plans to release a four-processor model later next year, said McDowell, who added that systems based on Intel's 64-bit Itanium chip are still years away.
The company detailed several improvements to its blade-management software. Automated provisioning software will let administrators install programs over a network and check whether servers have the latest bug fixes. Another program will let administrators change what groups of servers are doing to accommodate changing workload demands.
Sun, which is trailing its Intel server rivals in the blade market, is also working on software to make managing large groups of servers easier.
Hewlett-Packard, which plans to buy Compaq in a multibillion-dollar deal, has recently gained ground in the blade server market by adopting the CompactPCI standard. CompactPCI is widely used in the telecoms sector to pack many servers in as small a space as possible. Compaq, however, does not use CompactPCI, which McDowell said does not provide enough data transfer speed to link different blades within the same enclosure.
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