HP recently announced the industry’s first M.2 SSD for blade servers.  If you’re not familiar with M.2 (pronounced M dot 2), it’s a small form factor card and connector supporting applications such as Wi-Fi, WWAN, USB, PCIe & SATA seen mostly in desktop / laptop systems.  Adoption of this form factor in Tier 1 vendors is slow coming, which is why this is a big announcement for HP.  Since this plugs into the system board, it avoids traversing the SAS mid-plane and allows for connectivity to the system PCIe bus supporting faster speeds (see below for details.) Continue reading →