Great Lakes Computer Intros Free HP Blade Offers with vSphere

Great Lakes Computer reportedly announced it is giving away HP c-Class blade servers for free to anyone purchasing the vSpere 4.0 virtualization product from VMware, an EMC2 company.

Officials say, "In anticipation of our upcoming attendance at the 2009 VMworld show in San Francisco, we wanted to promote the Great Lakes Computer brand name on a national level, and bring our aggressive HP server prices and VMware professional services capabilities to a broader customer base. What better way is there than offering what is, in our opinion, simply the best VMware and HP blade server package in the market."

A 23-year-old global HP technology reseller with more than $1 billion technology sales, and officials said the HP blade servers models it is offering free are BL460, BL465 and BL685s with a 1 year platinum support for 2 CPU’s.

The standard configuration of blade servers generally include 2 quad core processors, 8GB of memory and a 3yr warranty, the company is offering to tweak the blade servers as per customers requests, and in case the modification requests are reasonable, then Great Lakes Computer may very well not charge a customization service fee.

Companies going in for 8 or more vSphere 4.0 licenses stand to gain a free C7000 blade enclosure, said officials, and added that the combined package savings are at discounted levels, usually reserved for only the largest HP enterprise customers.

"VMware vSphere 4 is the next generation platform that helps customers take advantage of the undeniable cost benefits of virtualization today while providing an easy path to delivering reliable and adaptable IT services through cloud computing,” said Parag Patel, vice president of alliances for VMware, in an earlier statement.

Cloud technology leverages of the computing prowess of tens of thousands of servers and millions of computers all across the globe to deliver solutions and data that need not reside in the end users own desktop computer or mobile computing device. It can handle rapidly increasing simultaneous data inputs and queries without any perceptible alteration in performance, gives the impression that the most of the applications reside in the end users’ systems when these actually reside elsewhere and function over the Internet, and is available as a service. Some agencies offer free unlimited usage and others charge as per consumption.

Great Lakes Computer says that qualifying VMware vSphere 4.0 Stock Keeping Units are VS4-ENT-C, VS4-ENT-P-SSS-C, and eligible HP c-Class blade server models are HP BL460, HP BL465, HP BL685 and c7000 chassis.