As of November 2019, HPE offers 2 types of enclosures in its BladeSystem lineup.
c7000
The BladeSystem c7000 enclosure has had multiple versions, the first version of which was announced in June 2006. In 2007 there was a minor update to the first version that included a larger Onboard Administrator display. The next update was in 2009 and brought RoHS compatibility, increased backplane speed, 1Gbit/s Onboard Administrator connectivity, and increased blade connectivity options like: 2x 10Gbit/s Ethernet support, 4x QDR or 1x FDR InfiniBand port support, and 6Gbit/s SAS. The third version of the c7000 enclosure, called the c7000 Platinum Enclosure was released in February 2013. It features location discovery services, thermal discovery services and redesigned backplane. The new backplane increased aggregate bandwidth 40% from 5 to 7 Tbit/s to allow use newest high-speed interconnect modules. Also the new Platinum Plus rating power supplies were announced with higher efficiency than previous Gold Plus rating power supplies. All versions of the enclosure occupy 10 rack units and can accommodate up to 16 half-height blade servers. It includes space for 6 power supplies, 10 cooling fans, 8 single-wide or 4 double-wide interconnect modules
c3000
The HPE c3000 enclosure was announced in August 2007. Updated version of the enclosure called c3000 Platinum was announced in February 2013. All versions of the enclosure occupy 6 rack units or can be used as a standalone unit It can accommodate up to 8 half-height blade servers. It includes space for 6 power supplies, 6 cooling fans, 4 single-wide or 2 single-wide and one double-wide interconnect modules
Server blades
HPE has offered general-purpose Proliant server blades as well as Integrity and specialized Proliant blades aimed at workstation virtualization. Blades can use half-height/full-height and single-wide/double-wide/quad-wide form factors. Apart from built-in 1Gbit/s Ethernet network adapters, optional mezzanine cards can be installed on the blades to further increase connectivity options. In the latest generation, HPE offers half-height Proliant BL460c blade servers with up to 2 Intel Xeon Scalable - 2nd Generation CPUs, 2TB of DDR4 Memory, and 2x PCIe 3.0 x16 I/O expansion mezzanine slots.
Networking
Several connectivity options are available for the HPE BladeSystem:
HPE Virtual Connect modules
HPE Aruba networking switches
Cisco Ethernet and Fibre Channel switches and fabric extenders
Broadcom Fibre Channel switches and pass-through modules
