HP announced a comprehensive set of HP BladeSystem configurations for Microsoft technologies designed to quickly and cost-effectively help organisations deploy, upgrade and consolidate Microsoft business applications onto a common infrastructure.

HP BladeSystem Solution Blocks are best-practice configurations that allow organisations to deploy reliable, optimised infrastructures to support their business applications.

New solution blocks include a collaboration configuration, based on Microsoft® Office SharePoint Server, and a data management solution block, based on Microsoft SQL Server.

“Customers can simply and cost-effectively scale their technology environment to meet the needs of the business with HP BladeSystem Solution Blocks for Microsoft,” said Jim Ganthier, director of BladeSystem marketing, Enterprise Storage and Servers, HP. “This best practice, building-block approach ensures that capabilities are added as they are needed, saving organisations time and money.”

HP BladeSystem includes all infrastructure elements – compute, storage, networking, power and cooling, as well as management – essential to saving organisations energy consumption, space and time.

Partners authorised by HP and Microsoft can easily configure and integrate Microsoft applications to quickly deploy and optimise customer infrastructures.

Midsized businesses can start with the smaller, lower cost HP BladeSystem c3000 and expand with a larger HP BladeSystem c7000 as needed. The power of HP BladeSystem technology coupled with Microsoft applications delivers a flexible infrastructure capable of handling changing business demands.

In addition to the HP BladeSystem Solution Blocks for Microsoft technologies, HP now offers Microsoft Windows® Small Business Server 2008 and Microsoft Windows Essential Business Server 2008 for purchase on HP ProLiant servers. The solutions are tested and certified on HP ProLiant servers to help customers maximise the benefits of the Microsoft Windows Essential Server applications.