SAN JOSE, CA -- HP (NYSE:HPQ) today introduced its combined blade server family -- now the industry's broadest portfolio of blade servers and technologies optimized to address customers' needs across enterprise data center, service provider and telco environments. The combined offering encompasses the HP Server BH and the HP ProLiant BL server blade product lines. In this morning's keynote address at the summit, Lin Nease, chief technical officer, HP Business Critical Systems, will outline a vision of how the nascent blade server segment will become a high-volume market. Nease will describe how the new HP -- the worldwide leader in overall server revenues -- is ready to meet the challenge of delivering complete solutions for more flexible, operationally efficient IT infrastructures. By providing blade server lines optimized for both enterprise IT as well as for telco computing and service providers, HP now offers the industry's most comprehensive and strongest portfolio of blade products, technologies, management software, tools, services and partner company relationships. "The expanded HP blade server portfolio and our technical innovation and leadership in blade technology and management software uniquely position HP to lead this emerging segment to a volume market that addresses a variety of customer needs. Blade servers are the ideal solution for a number of IT environments, providing customers a competitive advantage by enabling them to save time, space and resources and to manage their server environments more efficiently," said Mary McDowell, senior vice president and general manager, HP Industry Standard Servers. According to the latest server market forecast from industry analyst firm IDC, the blade server market is expected to grow from $50 million in 2002 to $3.7 billion by 2006. "Blades are the next logical market opportunity for the new HP," said Mark Melenovsky, IDC research manager. "With its existing leadership in the rack-optimized server market, and the company's innovation and technology expertise, HP's combined blade product line will become a key point of differentiation." HP Blade Server Product Family The combined HP blade server family offers customers greater choices and a breadth of solutions without compromising deployment optimization, standards or functionality. The HP blade server family, comprising HP Server BH and HP ProLiant BL server blade product lines, will share several common, standard core technologies, including: Fabric/interconnect technology -- Ethernet, iSCSI and Fibre Channel; Virtual presence and control -- HP OpenView, embedded lights out management, blade visualization and dynamic provisioning technologies; Scalable compute technologies -- IA-32, Intel® Itanium(TM) Processor Family and PA-RISC architectures. The HP Server BH blade product line has been designed specifically to meet the needs of telco and service provider customers. Its platform architecture takes advantage of existing telco and network equipment industry standards such as CompactPCI (cPCI) and NEBS, which are designed for business-critical applications. The HP ProLiant BL blade product line has been designed to meet the needs of corporate data center and service provider environments for multi-tiered scale-out applications, clustering and databases. The BL line is optimized for density and deployment using enterprise standards in the areas of network and storage fabrics (such as IP and Fibre Channel) as well as management (such as SNMP and IPMI). The newly combined HP blade family also will offer the broadest operating system (OS) and application support. Current and future OS support will include Windows® 2000, .NET, several versions of Linux and HP-UX. In addition, the HP Blade Server Alliance Program -- which extends customer choice and confidence by helping to assure interoperability with third-party software and hardware -- will encompass both blade server product lines. As a global leader in IT services, HP Services will help customers plan, deploy and administer blade servers to achieve increased business value from their IT investments. HP Services' expertise in consulting and integration, managed services, customer support, and domain expertise in blades, interconnects and management will further enable customers to seamlessly transition to blade environments. Both the HP Server BH and ProLiant BL Server blade product lines are shipping today. In the future, HP plans to deliver the next generation of blades, including dual- and quad-processor server blades using popular CPUs such as Pentium® III, Pentium 4, Xeon, PA-RISC and the Itanium processor family. Other blades providing access to SCSI and Fibre Channel storage, as well as high-speed networking, are also expected to be offered. More information on the new HP blade server family is available at http://thenew.hp.com/country/us/eng/prodserv/servers.html.