Hewlett Packard will launch in 2006 its first blade servers that use Intel Itanium processors.
The company will also offer its Unix operating system, HP-UX, on these systems.
The new servers are available now only with x86 Intel Xeon an AMD Opteron processors and can run Linux and Windows.

The HP Integrity BL60p server has two Madison 9M Itanium chips and the actual top model has 9MB of cache memory.
HP said that a model with two 1,6 GHz chips, 4 GB of RAM, two hard disks and Hp-UX license will cost 5,695 USD. Through the partitioning features available on a blade system, a server can be divided in such a way that it can run up to six different instances of HP-UX.

Although the Itanium Servers can run Windows and Linux, these operating systems will not be supported until the second half of the HP fiscal year, which ends on the 31st of October 2006.

The server producers are interested in this market segment because the blade servers have a ten times faster evolution cycle than the normal ones.

The HP blade servers have yet another launch delay, as the company had initially announced that these servers would be available in the mid of 2005.