Supercomputing Online's readers jumped behind the HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades and easily propelled it into first place in our annual Product of the Year competition. The survey had more than 750 respondents, with the HP BladeSystem c-Class receiving more than 25 percent of the total votes among twelve nominated products. The annual Awards identify significant new technologies of the past year which promise to make the greatest impact on IT strategies and honor the products which exemplify the best implementation of those technologies. AMD Opteron finished second, while Sun Microsystems Sun Fire x64 servers landed the bronze. The victory provides proof that HP's breakthrough BladeSystem c-Class server blades have scored a big win in the minds of our readers and says volumes about the leadership that HP continues for itself in the industry. The achievement highlights how more and more professionals are using data-intensive applications that are brought to life through HP's superior product. The great strength associated with HP's ability to innovate and integrate new technologies will drive increasing levels of performance and value to help the world's supercomputing professionals overcome the challenges they face. The revolutionary BladeSystem c-Class architecture is focused on innovating three key areas - power and cooling efficiencies, system management capabilities and virtualization: • HP Thermal Logic Technologies apply thermal controls to turn high density into a power and cooling advantage without compromising processing performance. Customers can save 33 percent in annual power costs vs. 1U rackmount servers. • HP Insight Control Management achieves a 200:1 device-to-administrator ratio – a tenfold improvement for many IT tasks – by integrating industry-leading system management tools from HP with the HP BladeSystem infrastructure. • The HP Virtual Connect Architecture, which solves networking complexity challenges by enabling customers to wire just once, is a breakthrough approach to connecting servers to LANs and SANs that simplifies operations between domains and eliminates barriers to change. With the new breakthrough design of the c-Class server blades, an average enterprise data center can realize over a three-year period: system acquisition cost savings of up to 41 percent; data center facilities cost savings of up to 60 percent; and initial system setup time cost savings of up to 96 percent. The HP BladeSystem c-Class servers are supported in HP's Unified Cluster Portfolio, a comprehensive, modular package of hardware, software and services for HPC. The portfolio's HP Cluster Platform 3000BL and 4000BL integrate the HP BladeSystem c-Class into HPC-optimized configurations, with choice of factory-installed cluster software, enabling rapid and easy deployment. The HP BladeSystem c-Class enclosure features the world’s fastest midplane at 5Tbps of aggregate throughput, and the first midplane to support 4X DDR InfiniBand, the industry’s fastest blade server interconnect delivering up to 20 Gbps bandwidth in each direction. "The HP BladeSystem c-Class servers are being recognized as the ideal platform for HPC clusters," said Winston Prather, vice president and general manager, High Performance Computing Division, HP. "The c-Class server blades provide the highest performance I/O mid-plane, supporting the highest performance cluster interconnects, plus increased processor and node support, more efficient power and cooling and simplified management. This all combines to give customers best-in-class performance while reducing the costs and obstacles of a racked, stacked and wired environment." More information about the HP BladeSystem c-Class servers can be found at its Web site. Detailed results on Supercomputing Online's Readers' Choice Award can be found at the voting booth.