HP impressed the judges by putting its fault-tolerant Integrity NonStop technology into a commodity x86 blade form factor last year, uniting two worlds that, for a long time, have been quite separate.

"The NB5000c BladeSystem caps the transition of NonStop from wholly customized hardware technology to a product line that fully leverages the same HP c-Class blade infrastructure that also includes x86 and Itanium-based products," the panel of judges reported. "This makes the fault-tolerant and high-performance NonStop architecture far more accessible in terms of both price" and ease of use than it has been historically.

Fault-tolerant systems like NonStop have traditionally been very expensive because of the hardware redundancy in these systems, and are used to keep mission-critical applications up and running at all times in businesses where even a moment of downtime threatens their financial health and reputation. Though these systems are still priced at a premium above standard x86 systems, HP lowered the bar for entry into fault-tolerance computing with the NB5000c BladeSystem.

A number of analysts have commented that HP's decision to use blade form factors for fault-tolerant servers is beneficial for users. "HP chose to use its BladeCenter design as the foundation, based on its strategy that all server designs should become more modular over time. The blade foundation gives it some nice attributes, like incremental add-ons or component maintenance, higher volume and, thus, better economics," said Jonathan Eunice, a principal IT adviser at Nashua, N.H.-based Illuminata, Inc.

To boot, a report by Standish Group International Inc. called "Trends in IT Value" reported that the Integrity NonStop BladeSystem performs the same tasks as an IBM mainframe at 35% lower total cost of ownership and with up to a 50% decrease in cost per transaction.

The minimum entry-level configuration of the NB5000c BladeSystem is two logical processors and pricing starts around $300,000 for a chassis, two blades, drives and memory, and an I/O and power package. A fully configured system runs from $750,000 to $1 million.

Bridget Botelho