HP ships 10 millionth ProLiant

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Jul 2005

HP reached a major milestone in the history of information technology with the shipment of its 10 millionth HP ProLiant server on June 22. HP, which has delivered nearly as many x86 servers as its next two competitors combined, presented the 10 millionth industry-standard x86 server to longstanding customer Continental Airlines during a ceremony at HP's manufacturing facility in Houston.

HP has also shipped more than 1 million Linux servers since 1998.

With an eye on shipping the next 10 million servers, HP announced several new systems and capabilities, including:

* an expansion of the industry's largest AMD Opteron portfolio with Dual-Core AMD Opteron processor-based two-processor servers;

* enhanced Factory Express configuration and installation service to HP BladeSystem customers; and

* a new HP Care Pack service offering integrated hardware and software implementation services for HP BladeSystem.

HP, which shipped its first x86 processorbased ProLiant servers in 1993, has held the No. 1 ranking for worldwide x86 server shipments for 35 consecutive quarters - nearly nine years.

"Microsoft congratulates HP for achieving this major milestone. HP ProLiant servers running the Windows platform have earned a reputation for high reliability, scalability, manageability and performance in the most demanding applications," said Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft Corp.

"We've been a long-time HP ProLiant customer, for work in our development labs, and long-time HP partner in delivering innovative solutions based on the best of our respective industry-standard technologies. We look forward to continued innovations with HP that deliver greater business value and reduce complexity for our customers."

Brad Anderson, senior vice president and general manager of Industry Standard Serversat HP, said HP was proud to celebrate this historic milestone with Continental Airlines. "We reached this milestone through our commitment of innovating on standards and delivering customers choice. For more than 10 years, ProLiant has delivered leading management tools while simplifying and reducing IT costs within the data center."

HP also launched Factory Express services for the HP BladeSystem, which are designed to pre-integrate complete blade solutions into customer data centers. The solution is designed to get HP BladeSystem customers up and running quickly with minimal effect on the customer site or resources. Customers can choose how their HP BladeSystem solution - including software, networking and storage - is integrated, tested, shipped and deployed.

In addition, HP introduced installation and start-up services for HP BladeSystem infrastructures as part of its HP Care Pack services. Helping customers reduce implementation time and improve IT infrastructure uptime, this service includes installation of the HP BladeSystem enclosure and server hardware, software deployment and manageability enablement.

The dual-core DL385 starts at $3,299, the DL145 G2 at $1,219, the BL25p at $3,099 and the BL35p at $2,599.

Earlier in the month, HP announced that it has set an industry-first milestone by shipping more than 1 million Linux servers to customers since 1998, 45 percent more than any other major hardware vendor.

HP says it has led the worldwide Linux server market for 29 consecutive quarters. A spokesman said that in the first quarter of 2005, HP grew 2.5 percentage points faster than the market in units on a yearover-year basis, shipped nearly 10 times as many Linux servers as Sun, led IBM by almost 8 percentage points in quarterly revenue share and outpaced Dell in both units and revenue.