While HP can’t talk about the current fiscal quarter right now, which would be interesting, Anderson did say in an interview yesterday that the fourth fiscal quarter ended in October was a record-breaking one for the ProLiant server product line. For one thing, HP sold the 8 millionth ProLiant server in the quarter, and has about 3 million to 4 million of those machines in the field, making that installed base the biggest server base in the world. Anderson also said that the company has shipped over 50,000 of its ProLiant BL blade servers in the two years since volume shipments started, giving it the largest market share.

What he did not say is that IBM started later with its BladeCenter blade servers and is coming on pretty strong. Only last week, IBM announced a skinny four-way blade server, the HS40, which is considerably denser than the BL40p that HP has been peddling. IBM can cram seven four-way blades into a 7U chassis, while HP can only get two four-way blades in a 6U chassis.

We think density almost becomes a gimmick at some point, said Anderson. He added that HP was more worried about having the right features in the blades, like more slots, more memory, and redundant cooling and power the things that its customers were asking for. HP has been selling four-way blades for a year, while IBM doesn’t get started until February 13. We’re monitoring the differences between IBM and HP blades, but we will probably diverge in our directions.

While not giving away any HP state secrets, Anderson said that the two-way BL20p and four-way BL40p blades would be enhanced, more than likely with the kickers to the Xeon DP and Xeon MP processors that Intel will soon start leaking information about. A kicker to the Prestonia Xeon DP (which has two-way SMP support) is expected around mid-2004, while a kicker to the Gallatin Xeon MP (which has four-way SMP support) is expected in late 2004 or early 2005. Both chips will present difficult thermal and acoustic challenges, and Anderson says that is where HP is focusing its attention right now.

HP will also this year start sunsetting the tc Series of entry servers that HP had before the Compaq acquisition and kept alive to appease the HP channel. HP has correctly seen that it needs to have all 32-bit X86 machines under the ProLiant umbrella, and has launched the ProLiant 100 series to attack the uniprocessor and two-way entry server market where high-end features are not as important as low prices and raw power.

As for the core two-way and four-way ProLiant DL and ML servers, Anderson says that there is a lot of stability in these products right now, based on Intel’s product cycle. The Xeon MP machines are very stable, meaning don’t expect a lot of changes, but the Xeon DP machines will have some subtle changes, according to Anderson. He would not say what they might be, but adopting 2.5-inch SCSI drives is not likely to happen until 2005, so that is not it.

HP’s main focus in 2004 when it comes to 32-bit X86 servers will be to close any price gaps with Dell, particularly on low-end machines. If HP is bringing this much new blood to the ProLiant line, it is clearly doing something right, even with all of the challenges it faces from Dell and IBM in the U.S. and Europe, Fujitsu-Siemens in Europe and Asia, and Legend and LangChou in China, who have been growing entry server shipments faster than HP.

This article is based on material originally produced by ComputerWire.