HP is doing the expected, announcing plans to roll out Opteron- and Itanium-based blade servers.

In the second half of this year, HP will start shipping an Opteron-based blade aimed at handling enterprise software workloads and scientific computing tasks, the company announced yesterday. HP is also set on selling an Itanium-based blade server but will not commit to a delivery date for the product. Should you think shoving a hot Itanic in a compact blade is impossible - think again. NEC plans to ship a dual-processor Itanium blade and chassis in September.

HP has fared well in an underwhelming blade market. The vendor claims to be the first to surpass the 100,000 blades servers shipped mark. That's after about three years in the game.

To boost its immediate prospects, HP has started shipping the ProLiant BL30p system. This is a a two-processor blade running on Xeons.

The standalone server starts at $2,349.

HP also has a deal with VMware for its BL20p blade server. Customers can buy 8 dual-processor HP blades, a blade chassis along with VMware's ESX Server partitioning software and other management packages for a starting price of $49,376. ®

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