Australian product manager Deke Rayner-Harvey said it will give users access to up to 876GB of storage, and will be available locally at the end of November.

With this release, Rayner-Harvey said HP's blade systems sales will double within 12 months.

"In Australia and New Zealand, the largest area for the growth of blades is finance. telecommunications and government," he said. " We have seen strong sales growth driven by our customer's desire to find a simple and cost effective IT infrastructure. Adoption of HP blade servers here has been consistent with strong growth trends around the world."

HP is also beefing up the capacity of its virtual tape library and enhancing a starter kit so users can set up a SAN in 20 minutes.

Rayner-Harvey said the HP StorageWorks SB40C storage blade, intended for file and print applications, mail and messaging, video streaming and small databases, is a direct-attached storage (DAS) blade that provides more storage than HP's existing server blades.