Blade server review: HP BladeSystem c7000

One look at the HP BladeSystem c7000 blade chassis and you understand why HP sells a lot of blades. The unit is aesthetically pleasing, extremely solid, and well appointed, with an LCD panel for chassis monitoring and control, eight half-width I/O slots in the back, six 2,400-watt power supplies, and 10 fans. As with the Dell, all of this is tightly power controlled, as the chassis can dynamically turn power supplies on and off to best meet the electrical load, while reducing energy consumption during lighter loads.

HP's c7000 is a strong blade platform with plenty of options, bells, and whistles. It has high density in 16 blades per chassis; solid management tools, including multichassis management from the embedded management console; and a full range of available blades, along with storage and tape blade options. It's lacking a bit in some smaller management features (such as remote share mounting and chassis-wide BIOS and firmware upgrades) as compared to the other solutions, but overall, it squarely hits the mark. On pricing, it falls into the middle of the pack.

Chassis and blades hardware

The HP c7000 came with nine BL460c compute blades, each running two 2.93GHz Intel X5670 Westmere-EP CPUs and 96GB of Samsung low-voltage RAM. In spec, these blades are essentially identical to the IBM and Dell blades we tested, with one important difference: While the Dell and IBM blades had dual embedded 1G NICs with a dual 10G mezzanine card, the HP blades had dual embedded 10G NICs with a dual 1G mezzanine card. It's clear that HP sees 10G as the rule now, not the exception.