The first Itanium-based blade server has been released by HP. Dubbed "the BL60p", the server will carry up to two 120GB SCSI disks and 8GB RAM. It also includes integrated lights-out management for remote administration, four 10/100/1000 NICs, and dual 2GB Fibre Channel ports.

HP sees the product as filling a hole in its range, said enterprise server manager John King, because it already had Xeon and Opteron-based blades. They can all be mixed and matched in HP's standard chassis, and managed using HP's Insight Manager tools.