HP also sees blades as becoming a dominant data center technology for users. "The new architecture will drive a new agenda to blade everything," said Anne Livermore, HP's executive vice president, who said the company believes demand for blades will accelerate. The company is reducing 85 data centers to six located in three cities, Houston, Austin and Atlanta.

HP BladeSystem c-Class, announced today, will replace HP's existing p-Class blade. The company will continue to produce blades for the p-Class series through 2007 and will support it through 2012.

The system will initially ship in July with Intel Corp.'s latest dual-core processors. HP plans to add Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processors by September and Itanium processors by year's end. Pricing on the c-Class system will be announced in July.

In the next few years, HP said it will produce a blade version of its NonStop system, said Scott Stallard, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise servers and storage, but he said putting the fault-tolerant system on specially made Itanium blades with redundant capability "completely changes the economics for NonStop" and will broaden use of a system primarily used today by financial services and emergency services.

The c-Class server incorporates NonStop capabilities that allow users to add new connections and update systems without having to take other systems down.