I attended one of the events today at London Bridge where HP "announced" the release of the new "C" Class blade enclosures. Nice bit of kit, but it was somewhat let down by a very American brand of marketing where we had two of the seniors from HP supposedly ad libing via script, very droll.
Anyway, I've popped over to their on-line buying and configuration tool in the US and by filling one of the new enclosures with 16 x BL460c's with Dual 3.2Ghz CPU's, 4Gb RAM, 2 x 36Gb 2.5" SAS Hot Pluggable Serial SCSI Drives for each, a 128Mb Battery backed write cache module each as well as and RDP and iLO license each - Total comes to USD$ 92,000
You then just need to add the Enclosure itself at around USD$4,500 - 5,900 depending on whether you want/need single or 3 phase power. So let's call it a cool ton? So that breaks down as USD$6,250 / server or about £3,750 / server.
But purely pricing is not the Unique Selling Point of these items, it would appear that HP have done some serious work in trying to really create something that does do a good job with keeping the Cooling under control, keeping the Power Consumption down AND making it easy to administer, manage and control. Still, we'll see how they are accepted, but as of yet - based on simply an eyeball of the Beta Hardware - I'd suggest that this kit is worth a serious look before you make any purchasing decisions regarding Servers?
Just some headline notes regarding the improvements, HP claims it can cool the 16 Blaeds in the Enclosure with "as little as" 100 Watts of cooling power, these new fans are supposed to be good enough that one of them alone would be sufficient to cool 5 older 1U Servers.
