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 expenditures 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 the following 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.
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.
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."
In addition, HP BladeSystem c-Class and StorageWorks 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 pro-cessing performance.
The ultra-efficient HP Active Cool Fan cuts server airflow by 30 percent and energy con-sumption by 50 percent compared to traditional fans.
HP Insight Control Manage-ment achieves a 200:1 device-to-administration ration – a tenfold improvement for many IT tasks – by integrating industry-leading system management tools from HP with the HP BladeSystem infrastructure.
Paving the way for improved system management is the new HP Onboard Administration, which integrates consumer-designed technology from HP’s Imaging and Printing Group.