The big question when we opened the crate containing HP's BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure was: Is this thing a blade server or is it a modular server put into a 6U rack profile? It's a bit of both. 

With its brand-new c3000 hybrid chassis, HP has remade its now-famous tower enclosure and the server's guts into a flexible blade-enclosure format, retaining all the niceties of discrete servers but adding the flexibility of rack/blade modularity. HP's c3000 Enclosure has a horizontal blade design that can accommodate as many as four full-width c-class blade devices or eight half-width server or storage blades.

Unlike HP's higher-end c7000-class blades, the c3000-family blade server is not the typical blade enclosure designed to be piled high and deep inside a network operations center. Instead, the c3000 we tested seems best suited for branch offices where it'll take up just the first six rack spaces, ostensibly sharing the rack real estate with other supporting equipment (routers, storage-area-network blocks and other network devices or appliances).

The overall performance of these blades was quite good, but we have to note that HP knew our blade server tests incorporate a "green" element -- we measure the electricity required to drive these things -- and shipped low-end CPUs, thereby optimizing it for low power consumption.

HP also supplied two server blades, the HP BL460c (based on a 64-bit Intel dual-core 1.6GHz Xeon 5110 CPU; this is the slowest one shipped on the blade); and the HP BL465c that uses Advanced Micro Devices' 2110 HE CPU (1.8GHz, 64-bit, dual-core, also the slowest and smallest shipped with an AMD CPU). Both server blades came with 1GB of memory and have similar serial-attached-SCSI drive connections.

	BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure OVERALL RATING 4.63 Company: HP Cost: $22,100 as tested. Pros: Comprehensive "data center in a box" opotions; strong management and deployment tools. Cons: Administration tools need unification; number of options available is staggering. The breakdown    Management/monitoring 25% 4.5 Power efficiency/performance 25% 4.5 Flexibility/features 25% 5 Serviceability 25% 4.5 TOTAL SCORE  4.63 Scoring Key: 5: Exceptional; 4: Very good; 3: Average; 2: Below average; 1: Consistently subpar

Click to see: NetResults for c3000