HP offers hybrid blade servers

The 4U SL6500 can hold eight blade servers

BARCELONA: HP has released its ProLiant SL6500 Scalable System modular blade server aimed at companies that need to provide large-scale application service delivery.

The 4U SL6500 can hold eight blades that can comprise traditional CPUs or general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPUs), offering a mix of general and scientific computation for businesses.

HP has put three GPGPUs in a single rack unit (1U), offering 1 teraflop of computation.

The SL-series of servers, which comprises the SL170s and SL390s, are very similar to blade servers that have proved popular in providing high-density computational capacity. However, the SL390 blade server is the first foray for HP into the fashionable GPGPU sector.

Although HP refused to say which GPGPU vendor it was using, judging by the mockup V3.co.uk can reliably say that NVIDIA's Tesla range of accelerators will be offered.

HP said that the SL-series of servers provide a mix of high performance computing (HPC) capability and traditional workloads such as web services. For those customers that opt wholly for CPU blades, HP said that it is possible to amass significant cost savings from power and deployment.

In the past, blade systems have relied on relatively uniform hardware configurations throughout the deployment. HP's SL-series tries to offer greater choice in what customers can deploy.

Pricing for the SL170s starts from $1,559, while the SL390 is from $2,239.