ASIA PACIFIC, Singapore, June 15, 2006 -- HP unveiled a breakthrough blade architecture that can save customers millions of dollars as they build out their data centers.

Three years in development, the HP BladeSystem c-Class leapfrogs the competition with innovations in virtualization, power and cooling, and system management capabilities that can reduce both operational and capital expenditure costs by 46 percent in a typical data center implementation.

In three industry firsts, the new HP BladeSystem enables users to wire computing resources once and change them on the fly, dynamically adjust power and cooling to reduce energy consumption, and increase administrative productivity up to tenfold.

The HP BladeSystem c-Class is also modular, allowing businesses of any size to start with HP ProLiant and Integrity servers, HP StorageWorks storage offerings as well as client blades and then flexibly add applications and third-party products to expand their data centers as needed.

With the new design, an average enterprise data center can realize over a three-year period: system acquisition cost savings of up to 41 percent; data center facilities cost savings of up to 60 percent; and initial system setup time cost savings of up to 96 percent.(1)

The HP BladeSystem c-Class portfolio is a key part of HP's Adaptive Infrastructure offering, which helps customers move toward automated, "lights-out" computing environments that lower the cost of IT operations and deliver a higher quality of service.

"The HP BladeSystem c-Class portfolio leverages the best technologies across HP - from NonStop servers to printers - and brings them together to fundamentally improve how our customers buy, build, manage and use their computing resources," said Tony Parkinson, Vice President & General Manager, Industry Standard Servers, Technology Solutions Group, HP Asia Pacific. "By implementing a simple, 'out-of-the-box' design, customers can dramatically reduce the biggest IT cost drivers and barriers to change in today's racked, stacked and wired data centers."

New blade architecture delivers the future of business computing

Rethinking approaches to today's most pressing data center challenges, HP focused its HP BladeSystem innovations in three key areas: virtualization, power and cooling, and system management.

The HP Virtual Connect Architecture solves networking complexity challenges by enabling customers to wire just once. For the first time, server administrators can manage resources on the fly via virtualized Ethernet and Fibre Channel connections, saving hours or days of administrative "wait time."

The virtualization is coupled with the industry's fastest midplane and five terabits per second of aggregate throughput. This combination provides years of headroom for the most demanding environments and support connectivity options for leading network brands.

In addition, HP BladeSystem c-Class and StorageWorks Storage Area Networks (SANs) simplify IT consolidation by integrating the server-to-storage interface. The new HP BladeSystem 4Gb/s Fibre Channel SAN switches and the industry's first redundant, embedded 4Gb/s Fibre Channel HBA reduce the cost of SAN connectivity to HP BladeSystem by more than 40 percent while providing highly available, redundant connection to existing SANs. The switches also reduce the number of Fibre Channel cables required by up to 60 percent.

Leveraging HP's company-wide focus on energy-efficient computing, HP Thermal Logic Technologies apply thermal controls to turn high density into a power and cooling advantage without compromising processing performance. For the first time, customers can minimize energy costs and environmental impact and ensure application availability with control efficiency at the component, enclosure and rack levels.

Related to this, the ultra-efficient HP Active Cool Fan cuts server airflow by 30 percent and energy consumption by 50 percent compared to traditional fans. In addition, the c-Class architecture can deliver power savings of up to 40 percent or more versus rack-mount servers.

HP Insight Control Management achieves a 200:1 device-to-administrator ratio - a tenfold improvement for many IT tasks - by integrating industry-leading system management tools from HP with the HP BladeSystem infrastructure. This combination unifies and automates management of physical and virtual servers, storage, networking and power and cooling through a single console.

Paving the way for improved system management is the new HP Onboard Administrator, which integrates consumer-designed technology from HP's Imaging and Printing Group. This feature brings unprecedented simplicity to system management by using words and graphics so customers of all sizes can easily set up, control, monitor, troubleshoot and repair the c-Class infrastructure - all through built-in modules via a web browser and an industry-first two-inch, interactive LCD window.

HP builds out HP BladeSystem ecosystem

The HP BladeSystem Solution Builder program connects hundreds of independent software and hardware vendors, systems integrators and value-added resellers to develop and deliver a broad set of valuable offerings to customers worldwide.

Some of the application and hardware partners involved in the launch of c-Class include: AMD, Blade Network Technologies, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Citrix, Emulex, Intel, Mellanox, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, PolyServe, QLogic, Red Hat, SAP, VMware and Voltaire.

New c-Class server blades include the HP ProLiant BL460c and BL480c. The BL480c is the first blade server of its kind, matching the features of the HP ProLiant DL380 - the world's best-selling server - with support for the widest variety of applications on blades. Both the BL460c and BL480c have more than two times the memory, hot-plug drives and I/O expansion capabilities than the IBM HS20 blade.

New HP services supporting c-Class include HP Enhanced Network Installation and Startup Service for HP BladeSystem Switches, a new HP Care Pack service offering that provides advanced configuration and testing of HP BladeSystem network interconnect devices to enhance the performance, scalability and reliability of the data center network. More information about HP Services for c-Class is available at www.hp.com/services/bladesystemservices.

To assure customers that they can continue to invest in and implement new industry-standard technologies without compromise, HP plans to upgrade product line roadmaps for the current HP BladeSystem p-Class through 2007. p-Class systems are fully interoperable with c-Class via common management tools, networking interfaces, power and racks. In addition, HP ProLiant p-Class server blades will be supported through 2012.

HP Financial Services can help customers transition to the new architecture via comprehensive investment protection programs and aggressive IBM blades buy-back programs. HP Financial Services also offers enterprise and small and mid-size business customers environmentally responsible product return and recycling options including leasing, trade-in and asset recovery.

Pricing and availability

The HP BladeSystem c-Class portfolio is expected to be available in July 2006, with pricing available at that time.

More information on today's announcement is available in an online press kit at www.hp.com/go/nextgenbladesystem. More information on HP BladeSystem c-Class is available at www.hp.com/go/bladesystem/evaluate.