Hewlett-Packard has designed and rolled-out a siamese-twin CPU server blade intended to provide the necessary computing power to those huge data centers which lack the space to spread out.

HP's new ProLiant BL2x220c G5 has been set up as the first blade that features two independent servers thrown together inside the same blade enclosure. The new 1U rack mounted blade has been conceived especially for those large resource-eating operations that need a lot of computing power, but do not have the required space to scale up the hardware or don't want to build up a new site for it. According to HP, the entire Web 2.0, cloud, and high performance computing (HPC) market may be included in it.

The server blade is powered up either by two Intel Xeon 5400 series Quad Core processing units, or by two Intel Xeon 5200 series Dual cores. The standard memory featured by the enclosure is set up at 8GB (4GB for each server), but can be scaled up to a maximum of 16GB. As for storage, each server features a 2.5" 120GB SATA drive.

The HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure will go up to 32 server nodes, two servers per slot, while the c3000 enclosure goes to 16 server nodes. The final scaling sum rises to 128, that being 1,024 CPU cores and two terabytes of memory in a single 42U rack, according to HP. The numbers should seem quite alright if we are to take a close look.

As power consumption is a bit of a problem these days, HP claims its blade server provides up to 60 percent more performance per watt than any Dell PowerEdge M600 servers cluster.

Checking up the features of the blade server, we find the change-ready connectivity through dual Gigabit Ethernet network interface cards and HP Virtual Connect. The x8 PCI-Express mezzanine socket supporting 4x double data rate InfiniBand fabric for low latency and high bandwidth also comes as an option.

"You can expect HP will have an industry leading roadmap," said Mark Potter, veep of HP's BladeSystem operations. "A couple of weeks ago we launched the StorageWorks 9100 Extreme Data Storage system - and this announcement is a part of that rolling thunder. Stay tuned, you'll see a lot more." Since the new blade server is designed for data centers with limited space, we wonder why HP hasn't put on the table one of those data centers in a shipping container, like Sun, Dell, IBM and Rackable have.


The price tag for the new HP ProLiant BL2x220c G5 is set at $6,349.