HP has expanded its BladeSystem portfolio with an Integrity blade designed to handle memory-intensive data centre workloads.

The Integrity BL870c blade is the company's first four-socket Integrity server blade, and is touted as being able to help businesses lower costs, save energy and space, and decrease data centre deployment times.

HP said that the new server can help businesses of all sizes realise power savings of up to 25 per cent.

Space requirements can be reduced because 2.5 times as many BL870c server blades fit into the same space as a comparable rack-mount configuration.

"The BL870c expands the BladeSystem portfolio into the heart of the business-critical market, combining the benefits of blades in cost, time, change and energy, with the proven scalability and availability of Integrity systems," said Mark Potter, vice president of BladeSystem at HP.

The BL870c builds on HP's first c-Class Integrity blade, the BL860c, by offering twice the processing power and twice the memory capacity.

Customers have the option of running Microsoft Windows, HP-UX 11i v2, HP-UX 11i v3, OpenVMS, RedHat or SuSE operating systems.

HP also has created what it is calling 'Solution Blocks' for its Integrity servers, which it hopes will take the guesswork out of building an Integrity blade system.

These HP-tested configurations allow customers and resellers to deploy more applications on the HP BladeSystem quickly and easily.

Each block includes combinations of Integrity blades, application software, HP storage and interconnect technology, and is designed to simplify the deployment of enterprise applications and optimise the use of the HP BladeSystem enclosure to save time and money.

Initial Solution Blocks available for Integrity blades include enterprise resource planning, service-oriented architecture, application integration and product data management.

The HP Integrity BL870c server blade and Solution Blocks for Integrity server blades are available now. Pricing for the BL870c starts at just under £4,700.