The HP C-Class blade systems are NOT designed for a small business like the Intel solution, they are designed for corporate environments.

Also, the HP solution is a 10U Rackmount (or 6U Pedestal), where as the Intel SMB Solution is 6U.

The real innovation in this system from my experience has been it's manageability. It completely eliminates the need for setting up through complicated hyper terminal sessions and the like. Everything is web based so it is accessible from anywhere (including the Remote KVM feature, which you can re-route your local cd rom and ISO's through).

The virtual drive assignment and drive pooling is much more powerful than any previous setup, as you can span multiple types of arrays (RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 5E, 6) across the same set of drives.

Get your own RAM if you want to load it up

Hp is offering something like this right now..
its C-class enclosure (rack mount like Intel's personal solution)

It takes 10 half hight blades or 5 1u blades or any combination...you can mix and match with storage as well.

anyhow beats Intel density half height have 2 sockets full hight 4, half hight can take 64gb a piece and full take 128.

so as far as density is concerned you get a max of 80 cores per enclosure in a 2 by 2 by 3 foot area...hows thar for dense.

and yes storage...blade has either 2 or 4 2.5" hot swap sas on them with either HP's own smart array controller or an LSI controller. yup dual etho on all
so forgive me if I fail to see innovation here. Not that anyone could afford maxed out blades but ...the capability is there.

I sent this to you guys, and we have about 20 of them we are actively shipping as demos.

They are a beast and a half compared to the old clunky blade setup.

I love em!