HP blades spared the axe?

HPaq has offered us some clarification on how it will juggle the rival blade offerings - from Compaq and the Old HP.

HP certainly put a lot more marketing muscle behind its Compact-PCI blades, and earlier, than Compaq. HP had promised RISC-based blades running HP-UX as well as Linux and Windows x86 OSes.. Although, as many analysts have pointed out, they're blades only by name, not by size, and don't match the densities of most rival offerings. Compaq's relatively paltry offering was announced in February.

On Tuesday we read that reports that HP's blade would be deep sixed, and many more reports that it would survive. This is what the first SRCAM roadmap promised:-

"For the growing market for blade servers, we will continue to offer the ProLiant blade server architecture for the data center. We also will offer HP's blade server optimized for the telecommunications market."

"Both products can be retained, with HP's blade servers focusing on the telecommunications opportunity around NEBs-compliant, CompactPCI standards hardware and Compaq's blade servers focusing on the enterprise opportunity with the density and customized blade-case and back-plane to address more traditional server workloads."

More clarification is expected at the Blades Summit conference in San Jose next week.®

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