HP launches blades, storage and enclosure for mid manufacturing market

Dubbed C3000, the new enclosure follows on from last year’s introduction of the C7000 and C class blades, but is just half the size – 6U high and taking up to eight server blades or a combination of storage and tape backup unit. It’s an impressive beast. According to Peter Mansell, HP’s industry standard sever division blades product manager, C3000’s technology and shared bus mean that the unit can handle the compute requirements for up to 1,000 employees, yet simply plugs into a wall socket. “There are no particular power or cooling requirements, unlike a data centre system,” he says. “It’s the first product of its type and we’re aiming it at remote sites and backup or office location. So this will take the benefits of blades to a much wider audience.” Beyond the energy-saving benefits of the enclosure Mansell cites: a significant reduction in cabling compared with conventional systems due to its integrated switching and fibre technology; and significant flexibility. “This is ‘wire once and deploy many’,” he explains. “They can configure the power and switches, set up the cooling and deploy whatever blades to suit – and the enclosure can mix and match. The same applies to storage.” It’s a similar story with HP’s Storage Blade 600C, which is based on its earlier all-in-one product. This comes with snapshot facility and replication for automated disaster recovery and business continuity, as well as acting as a backup server, using a licensed version of Data Express. What’s more, its management tools mean you can look after multiple platforms from a single point without specialist IT resource – and the system eases problems around data migration and protection, with everything handled through Wizards. Says Steve Watson , product marketing manager for storage: “It’s a perfect fit for C3000 because it gives this unit the ability to provide everything. It’s got a terabyte of shared storage so you get a NAS for file serving. It also works as an ISCSI target, so can use it as an application storage device as well. So in a single enclosure with, say, SQL Server and Exchange Server blades, you can get what looks like direct attached disk over ISCSI all in the single unit.”