Taking a small break from all the buzz surrounding HP Cloud Services, Hewlett-Packard reaffirmed the plus side of being a large vendor with strong relations.  Just 24 hours after Intel’s new server chipsets were announced, HP unveiled a new lineup of ProLiant servers for the SMB market that ship with freshly baked Xeon under the hood.

The product family includes the TroLiant DL360e 1U and DL380e 2U rack servers, the  BL420c, and the ProLiant ML350e Gen8 tower server.  The ML350 is more cost efficiency oriented, and all three are powered by Intel.

In turn, the new ProLiant DL385p and BL465c Gen8 boxes are both powered by AMD’s much hyped Opteron 6200 chips. They’re designed to handle large workloads in virtualized environments, and the latter even sets a new record as the first blade server with 2,000 cores per rack.

We can expect more launches further down the road:

“The new servers are expected to be available in June. Also this summer, HP will start shipping ProLiant scale-up servers—both racks and blades for highly dense environments—powered by Xeon E5-4600 chips.”

Hewlett-Packard had a big hardware update today, but that doesn’t mean that the Cloud Services news from last week has died down. That’s when the IaaS officially entered into public beta, and third party vendors literally started lining up to announce integration with their offerings and cloud certifications.

Today a couple more jumped aboard the HP cloud bandwagon.  StorSimple optimized parts of its storage management platform for HP Cloud Services, including the capacity to store data on multiple deployments hosted by different providers. At the same time TwinStrata announced a demo of its CloudArray storage gateway that gives users up to 1 terabyte worth of free storage on HP’s infrastructure.