MUMBAI, INDIA: AMD announced that Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors would exclusively power the innovation behind the world's first blade server designed specifically to eliminate performance bottlenecks for virtual server hosting, the HP ProLiant BL495c virtualisation blade.

Businesses requiring the flexibility to support more virtual machines per server can now choose from a broad suite of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers from HP, ranging from blades to high-performance multi-processor platforms.

Patrick Patla, general manager, server and workstation business, AMD, said: "Businesses continue to face memory and I/O constraints as they implement virtualisation solutions across more mission-critical workloads. The Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor has once again proved to be the processor of choice in helping alleviate these demands. With direct connect architecture and AMD-Virtualisation technology (AMD-V), the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor is shaping the direction of virtualisation by empowering IT managers with more virtual machines and leading x86 virtualisation performance."

Mark Potter, vice president and general manager, BladeSystem, HP, said: "Customers can lower data centre costs with the BL495c by packing more virtual servers into each blade, which extends the useful life cycle of the data centre by saving floor space, power and cooling. Through its balanced architecture of memory, I/O and storage innovations and by matching the exceptional scalability and efficiency of Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors, the BL495c redefines server blades for virtualisation."

Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor-based servers take advantage of AMD-V technology with rapid virtualisation indexing. Rapid virtualisation indexing is the industry's only x86 virtualisation technology that includes hardware support for a second level of address translation, allowing virtual machines to more directly manage memory, which can help dramatically reduce latency and thereby improve performance across many virtualised applications.