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2007 was a monumental year for server blades, according to recent figures released by IDC, the global market intelligence firm. In November, the company noted in the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker that the server blade market accelerated for the fourth consecutive quarter with factory revenue growing 41.4% year over year.

Blades now account for a tenth of all server shipments. Their popularity is as much due to the way they simplify the deployment, maintenance and recovery of servers as to the significant savings they offer.

Offering versatile and highly efficient blade solution offerings, HP remains the clear leader in blade server technology worldwide and dominates the EMEA market with 55.1%, according to the IDC report. The release of a new and highly versatile tower form of the HP BladeSystem Enclosure means the HP lead is set to continue.

Supreme versatility in deployment

Since September 2007, businesses worldwide have been taking advantage of "Shorty" – the BladeSystem c3000 for sites with 19" racks. The HP c3000 extended the benefits of blades to meet the special needs of small to medium-sized business or remote offices with limited space and budgets.

The newly released tower form of the HP BladeSystem c3000 means blade cost savings and performance benefits can be now be installed in environments never previously thought possible, such as branch offices with minimum IT infrastructure.
 
As with Shorty and the larger HP BladeSystem c7000 Enclosure (designed for the needs of large data centres), the new tower provides an all-in-one infrastructure solution that pack servers, storage and communication into one integrated box. Like Shorty, the tower can contain eight server or storage blades and four high-speed networking bays, making it ideal for small spaces with big computing and storage needs. 

However, because the tower version requires no rack, it means greater versatility for deploying blades in environments with constrained space. As the tower unit includes built-in rollers, it is also readily moveable, which further increases the flexibility of the solution.

Available from January 2008, the tower version requires no special cooling or power. Rated for environments up to 36o, it can simply stand in the corner of a computer room or closet and plug into the nearest power socket or UPS. The availability of a new KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) option for the HP c3000 rounds out the management.

All the benefits of the BladeSystem

The tower form provides all the competitive advantages of the rack-mounted HP BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure. This includes a reduced energy consumption of up to 30 percent thanks to enhanced power and cooling technologies. 

As both forms are pre-wired and pre-configured, adding a new server into a c3000 Enclosure is as simple as just plugging it in and almost any variation of HP ProLiant, Integrity and StorageWorks blades can be mixed and matched to run a choice of thousands of applications.