Hewlett-Packard is expected to announce its first blade servers that use Intel's Itanium processor on Tuesday in the US, sources familiar with the product plans said.

HP is currently the second-place blade seller after IBM, and together the companies account for the lion's share of shipments and revenue for the thin servers. Right now, one difference between their products is that IBM's Power processor-based blade can run the company's version of Unix, AIX, but HP's machine can't run its own take on the operating system.

That will change with HP's Itanium blades, which can run the HP-UX version of Unix. Itanium-based computers also can run Linux and Microsoft Windows.

ZDNet