The BladeSystem c-Class enclosure, announced in June, holds up to 16 blades, either server or storage, he said. Each storage blade can support up to six 2.5-in serial-attached SCSI drives of up to 146GB, meaning that each storage blade can support up to 876GB, he said.

Users install a storage blade by plugging it into an enclosure that already has a server blade in it, and the server blade automatically sees the additional drives and starts an array configuration application that lets the user set up the array, including defining support for RAID levels 0, 1, 5 and 6, Rayner-Harvey said.

Illuminata analyst John Webster said the storage blade gives organizations that are using HP servers with DAS a way to upgrade and consolidate their servers without having to migrate to network-attached storage (NAS) as well.

"Users don't always want to migrate to NAS because just replacing servers with blades is a big enough step," he said.

However, Joseph Martins, an analyst for Data Mobility Group, said he was hoping that major storage vendors such as HP would start providing information management functionality rather than just the storage capacity itself, such as providing an information management library, performing versioning and letting users check files in and out.