But the fact remains that rival IBM has been able to get more blades in a box than HP, and this has helped the company ramp up volumes in this nascent part of the server market at a rate that now exceeds that of HP. Gimmick or not, HP has to do something.

So today, HP will preview at the Server Blade Summit in San Jose a new ProLiant BL blade server that allows it to double the density of processing capacity in its two-way Xeon DP blade designs. The ProLiant BL chassis is a 6U form factor that can house up to eight of the existing two-way Xeon DP blade servers, which are called the BL20p. These blades have integrated SCSI disk drives, which are important to certain customers who are running the blades not as compute nodes in a cluster, but as full-blown application servers that need to house their own data sets.

To double the density on the new BL30p blade, HP has removed the SCSI storage from the blade, which cuts its width in half and therefore HP can now cram 16 two-way servers into a single chassis. The BL30p blade uses a single IDE-ATA disk drive to house a local operating system and relies on Gigabit Ethernet or dual Fibre Channel ports to link to NAS or SAN drives for the files that are actually used by applications running on the blade servers.

According to James Mouton, vice president of platforms for HP’s Industry Standard Servers unit, HP can now put 192 Xeon DP processors into a single rack, compared to IBM’s 168 processors with its two-way BladeCenter HS20 blades. For an equivalent number of processors of equal speed, that comes to a 14% performance advantage per rack for the HP ProLiant BL compared to IBM’s BladeCenter.

That may not be enough to help HP win a lot of deals against IBM on just density alone, but IBM had an 83% advantage on performance per rack prior to the advent of the BL30p, and that certainly was helping Big Blue win lots of deals. Mouton says that the BL30p is really aimed at those customers who are looking at getting the most performance per rack on the floor. He says that the BL30p will start shipping some time in the second quarter, and says further that while pricing has not been set, pricing will be consistent with the BL20p, with perhaps a slight premium to cover the cost of extra power supplies and fans needed to keep such a dense device cool. Incidentally, the BL20p, BL30p, and the four-way BL40p can all be mixed and matched in the same 6U BL chassis.

On the uniprocessor front, HP is coming out swinging with a new tower server called the ML110, part of its entry ProLiant 100 series. IBM and Dell in the Americas, Fujitsu-Siemens in Europe and Asia, and Legend and LangChou in China have all been growing entry server shipments faster than HP in the past year or so, and the company has seen that it needs to do better down at the low end in terms of getting a good server (meaning not just a PC tipped on its side) out the door at a ridiculously low price.

This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire