What storage management capabilities have you added? The big breakthrough here goes to the Virtual Connect [architecture] capability. If you stand behind a rack of 1U or 2U ProLiants and their associated storage elements, you will see a sea of Fibre Channel cables. And if you actually wanted to say, "Wait a minute, I would like to have these servers talk to that storage instead of this other one," you would have to do a work order with your data center, come in, unplug those and move those around. Virtual Connect allows you to go in and hook those storage elements once to this infrastructure and never touch those wires again. As you add storage, compute elements or as you want to put a different application or workload on any one of those elements, the system administrator, even remotely, can make that mapping different. It's an abstraction layer, a virtualization layer that allows you to create that association that is dynamic rather than static.

You said you're using technologies from HP's NonStop fault-tolerant systems in the BladeSystem line. Which ones? We brought over some of the interconnect technology that is part of Virtual Connect [a virtualized wiring architecture built into BladeSystem]. We also took some of the technologies in hot-plug interfaces. In the NonStop environment, you can never take your system down to accommodate [changes in devices].

Do you plan to put the NonStop systems in a blade server form factor? It's going to take a few years, but our plan is to run NonStop -- 100 percent-availability-type systems -- on these blades that are specially made but still in the c-Class chassis and that have either dual- or tri-modular redundant capabilities. It completely changes the economics equation for NonStop computing. Things that used to be only the domain of banks or stock exchanges -- those things will not be one-off proprietary systems but instead will be environments of these industry-standard blocks that we deploy dynamically.