The Business Intelligence Blog

HP Unveils Worlds First 2-in-1 Server Blade for Cloud Environment

HP released a new ProLiant blade enclosure Wednesday with higher server densities designed for cloud computing and other computing-intensive applications.

With up to 32 server nodes in a single 10U blade chassis, the new BladeSystem can scale up to 128 servers, 1,024 CPU cores and 2TB of RAM in one standard-sized rack consisting of four enclosures, HP says. The new blade offers double the density of its HP predecessors by fitting two servers into each slot, says Paul Miller, HP’s marketing vice president.

Amazon finding money in the ‘cloud’

But Bezos simplified the business of Amazon.com — which has ventured into a whole new arena of computing services — by breaking down its customers into three groups: consumers, third-party sellers and developers.

Third-party sellers account for 30 percent of the units sold on Amazon, Bezos said.

The amount of bandwidth used by Amazon Web Services, which includes cloud computing and server storage space, recently surpassed the bandwidth used for its retail business, he said.

The Web services division was formed about four years ago.

Another reason why cloud computing is the in-thing these days. From WP -

Microsoft Corp sees tens of millions of corporate e-mail accounts moving to its data centers over the next five years, shifting to a business model that may thin profit margins but generate more revenue.

In an interview ahead of the Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit, Chris Capossela, who manages Microsoft’s Office products, said the company will see more and more companies abandon their own in-house computer systems and shift to “cloud computing,” a less expensive alternative.

Cloud computing is the trend by Internet powerhouses to array huge numbers of computers in centralized data centers to deliver Web-based applications to far-flung users.

Microsoft built its business selling software to run on local machines, both computer servers and personal computers, but, in recent years, it has invested billions of dollars in massive data centers, which are the basic infrastructure for a wide range of Web services.