HP has its expanded its utility computing platform with its introduction of BladeSystem, a package comprising blade servers, management software and virtualisation tools.

The company said that integrated blade systems deliver lower infrastructure costs - often 25 per cent less expensive overall than traditional rack-mount infrastructures - and lower annual support costs with automated control.

Rudi Schmickl, HP EMEA vice president and general manager of enterprise storage and servers, said that HP's modular approach to delivering utility-like capabilities with the BladeSystem would help lower the overall cost of blades ownership.

"By 2008 we expect that 50 per cent of HP's scale-out architecture business will be based on the HP BladeSystem," he said in a statement.

Schmickl also showed off enhanced management software tools. He said the integration of Utility Data Center capabilities into the HP BladeSystem management suite of tools was designed to manage, control and virtualise an existing IT infrastructure as one system from a single remote console.