While the banking sector has been a heavy investor in blade server racks to manage resource-intensive transaction processing applications, the soaring costs of cooling the heat-generating kit has become a pressing issue. In some cases, the cost of implementing adequate air conditioning has substantially outweighed the original cost of the servers.

HP says its new BladeSystem c-Class box, which has been three years in development, addresses this problem as it features new technology to monitor temperature and 'Active Cool Fans', which cuts server airflow by 30% and energy consumption by 50% compared to traditional fans.

The vendor has additionally moved to tackle networking complexity challenges by introducing virtualised ethernet and fibre channel connections for resource management on the fly. Faster throughputs and integrated server-to-storage interfaces have also been incorporated in an effort to simplify IT consolidation. And systems administration bottlenecks have been addressed by unifying systems management tools and delivering outputs through an easy-to-operate central console.

HP says the infrastructure can reduce both operational and capital expenditure costs by 46% in a typical data centre implementation.

The new kit has been welcomed by early adopter clients in the banking sector.

Tim Myers, group vice president, enterprise technology infrastructure, SunTrust Bank says the implementation of HP BladeSystem server blades in the data centre has enabled the bank to act smarter in driving consolidation, managing costs and maximising performance. "SunTrust has realised significant numbers of server consolidations, cost savings and excellent performance through our use of BladeSystem p-Class and we’re driven to push the envelope even harder with the new c-Class architecture."