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Linux On HP Blades
HNFO writes: "HP is unveiling their new 'blade' servers that fit onto a single card. Their press release is here. They are currently available with your choice of RedHat, Debian and SuSE. A picture of the card can be found here and a picture of the chassis can be found here."
If you're looking for high-density slot-based computers, earlier postings about RLX's Transmeta blades and
OmniCluster's x86 variety might interest you as well.
Advances in ultra-dense space heating technology will deprecate the use of the central heating system in the server room
...in bed.
It may be designed for high-density, minimum use of space servers for companies, but personally, I would love to encase that puppy in a little black box and make it my media server at home. It would make a nice, neat, hardly noticeable (compared to my ugly beige Dell case - blech!) all encompassing, reconfigurable media server for piping mp3's, DVD's, mpeg's, and other digitized media to my home theatre from all over the house...
Blade/Chassis links to the same image, I'll try to dig up the URL for the actual chassis.
Did anyone else notice that the two pictures link to the exact same thing?
Blink
Does anyone know how much heat each if these blades will generate? Nowadays just the idea of 2 Athlons in a single tower screams "SPACEHEATER!", but what are the specs on these things? Are they made to each be really high performance, or good performance at lower power usage/heat release?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Buy the razor at a reduced cost first, then pay for blade after blade after blade.
(Actually, all joking aside, this really does happen in the technology business. Especially HP! Buy the printer at a very reasonable cost and then pay big time for the stinking ink cartridges.)
How to Download YouTube Videos
Wine, running Cygwin, running Debian GNU/w32 on this badboy?
I think this *should* be it: http://www.hp.com/products1/servers/blades/product s/bh7800/index.html
"The HP Blade Server bh7800 Chassis architecture incorporates network switching, storage interconnect, and space for multiple servers into a single, highly available chassis infrastructure. The horizontally scaled 38-slot, 13U-high HP Blade Server bh7800 chassis has both front and back access. It supports from 1 to 16 server blades, 1 or 2 network blades, 1 to 16 storage blades of multiple types, and an intelligent management blade."
try this link.
Uhh, so what? It's just another compact PCI board. Check out Force computer, Motorola, and a dozen other companies that make cPCI boards.. (and have for at least 4+ years..)
News flash: HP reinvents the compactPCI board...
I like this analysis at , where it seems that you'll get 48 in a 40u rack. Compared to the RLX, which gets several hundred, it isn't quite so flash.
Of course having Linux available before Windows and HP-UX is interesting...
Go here for links to all the Blade photos (front, back, chassis, and specialty blades).
at www.clustercompute.com I thought I had the previous highest density record... not any more :)
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Really? I've been working with HP 9000 workstation and server support for several years, and have never had a problem. In fact, I've had to call on several separate issues today and each was resolved very quickly.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
This is very cool, on many levels: space-saving, open architecture, and so forth.
And sure, there's a lot of collaboration going on behind it as the press release says, but what's the likelihood that Blades will actually be a force in server hardware? A lot of companies are worried enough about financial situations without replacing large amounts of their assets.
Just seems like a helluva risk to take, with this New Cool thing. When it DOES gain popularity, though, it'll be nice to hear success stories about physically cooler server rooms(I'd imagine) with more space for NERF combat or Ultimate Frisbee.
They made me order a driver cd for a scanner. I had to pay for it. They wouldnt let me download it. They suck.
According to Cnet, Compaq will be offering Proliant BL series of bladed servers soon as well. According to the article, HP was able to beat Compaq and others to market with their bladed offerings because HP went with an existing CompactPCI architecture, whereas Compaq believes CompactPCI doesn't offer high enough data transfer rates for bladed servers.
Overall we came to the conclusion that the Blades were novel, but overpriced and underpowered, at least for our needs. But organizations who can afford to pay extra and get very little for it won't mind the Blades.
df
I'll stick to standard high density rackmounts for my cluster projects that need better local disk IO.
my $.02 of course
What we need are PCs that come with a single, directing processor on the mainboard and a bunch of PCI slots for daughtercard machines, running an OS geared towards clustering and paralell processing. They'd be able to get a lot more oomph than the current-generation single processor machines, and a non-von-neumann architecture, with multiple processing points might finally get people out of the WIMP interface paradigm.
These Linux-running blade machines seem to be a good first step on this evolutionary path.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Doesn't Sun already have a blade? Look out! Here come's the landsharks.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Here's an embedded link for those who don't care to futz with cut-n-paste.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
well, i didnt want to go through the whole silly 'save as' crap, so here is the link to the high res photo:
v er bc1100_pr_01675.jpg
http://www.hpservernews.com/blades/photos/HPSer
hey moderators, mod this up please, it's more
interesting than the original article, you
could build one of these yourself !
This has got to be a troll.
This product looks like dead in the water.
... sortof... like... ahem... dense...
They need ridiculous 13U to house 16 blade servers - that's like 1.2 Severs per U.
Have a look at the RLX beasts linked in the article. Those have 24 blades in a 3 U case - that's a whopping 8 Servers per U. Now, that's "ultra density".
The HP stuff ist just
f.
Hello,
After careful consideration, I have deemed this story to be an insufficient challenge to my abilities. Therefore, there will be no official beowulf post made to this story, by me.
Instead, I will ask all of you creatures to be on your honor, and, on your own, to please imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
I worked on the management blade. It's based around a StrongArm 110 and runs Linux 2.4. It has no hard disk and uses a RAM disk instead. Power on to prompt in 20 secs.
With the recent exodus (sorry) from hosting providers, is rack space all that valuable anymore? I mean, for people who aren't still stuck in contracts?
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
According to my friend, they have actual customers and a shipping product, which is more than most of the other blades on the market seem to have (although I would bet HP already has preorder customers). I wonder how a big company like HP will affect the market for smaller companies like Racemi and RLX.
The Racemi box is very open-source friendly in terms of software and the like. They do a lot of the scheduling code in python, which is one of my favorite languages.
How much do these things cost anyway (any of them)? Minaturization is always expensive. Just look at the (now dead) Apple Cube. Cool, but overpriced.
- Vincit qui patitur.
this thing does 48 to 96 processors in same space as HP, seamless application failover, runs linux. Testing it for a financial company, and so far it rocks. http://www.egenera.com (working as a consultant for the company but I have no loyalty anyway...)
Good one. HP is naming a small scale server that will go directly against low end Sun Blade 100s and 1000s blade.
There are a lot of other companies also making blades for compactPCI.
Motorola makes a whole line of them based on the G3 and G4 chips. Nortel uses them (running linux) for their compact VoIP solutions.
Why is it that the Linux choices vendors offer is always limited to just SYSV style distributions? If they really believe choice is good, why not offer a real choice and include some different kinds of systems with that?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Why all the fuss about HP?
CompactPCI Blades running Linux are old news. Intel has been selling them for over a year now and they rock. They even have a dual proc version on the market. Check out http://www.ziatech.com
I've evaluated the RLX chassis-based systems before, and compared to these, I think that RLX has them beat hands-down. RLX offers 3 NICs per board, less power requirements and probably equal speed.
I'm also sure that RLX costs less, unless you buy the IBM relabeled ones.
So what it comes down to is a nice first try for HP, but I'll stick with RLX until Compaq makes their entry--then I'll re-evaluate again.
No Not Again! Its whats for dinner.
It would be *really* cool if they'd make a laptop that would accept blades. Then you could pull a server out of the chassis and take it on the road with ya...
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Why is it that some people just don't know how to say "Thank you"? They didn't have to offer a form of *NIX AT ALL and they give you 3 different distro's of Linux and the BEST you can come up with is that there are only SysV style distros?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
the did that to my dad too. for his scanner drivers for win2k. and the drivers didn't even work!
Eurocard is good packaging. Industrial control, telephone COs, traffic light controllers, and Sun servers have been built that way since the 1980s.
A note on nomenclature: Eurocard is a physical packaging standard dating from 1981. Eurocards come in 3U, 6U, and 9U heights. Compact PCI generally uses 3U, VMEbus uses 3U and 6U, and Sun servers used 9U. "VMEbus" is sometimes confused with Eurocard, but there's lots of stuff in Eurocard packaging that's not VMEbus compatible. These "blade" machines are 6U Eurocard, but the signals at the back connectors are, as I understand it, network interfaces and such, not a bus.
and I wonder if Sun will sue.. they have a series of workstations called Blades.
different class and slightly different market, but how does the name in another computer device affect trademarks and or copyright??
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
This is the extent we have to go to to get legacy free x86 machines? No serial, no parallel, no floppy.... encase that sucker in lucite and call it an iBlade!
When one of these big corporations offers specific Linux distributions, they generally deny support ... even support for the hardware itself ... unless you run not just that distribution (or one of, if more than one offered), but also run only the copy they provide to you. When it is the case that the choices they make are not all that diverse (well, Debian is a bit different than Redhat or SuSE, but not in everything), then the customers are basically limited.
The best hardware vendor will be one that offers OS support for whatever OS they want to offer support for, but also offers _hardware_ support for plain hardware. And they also make sure that hardware is sufficiently standardized enough to work not only virtually every Linux distribution that uses a stock kernel, but also with the big three open source BSDs as well.
Ultimately, I don't want their distribution anyway. I can put my own on there. But I do know that when the vendors are offering an OS like this, they are declining support for the hardware when alternatives are used. That is the problem.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I like the "Network Switch Blade" the best.
cat
Since when is this new? Even with Windows you can lose support if you use anything other than the OEM versions they give you.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
A datasheet on hp site mentions that the blade servers support PA-RISC software, has Transmeta done a PA-RISC code morphing software or is there just another blade server modul that has a PA-RISC cpu instead of a crusoe ?
If there is a PA-RISC emulation then it should be easy to add other architectures. A crusoe based computer that could run x86, powerpc and pa-risc software would be very nice. Being able to run MacOSX on my PC from time to time would be really nice.
Jan
how long until someone hacks XP into it?
i suppose they can run linux xbsd or something else on them but linux is a nice buzzword at the moment
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Many companies are planning to move to IB based blades. Dell for one; they are calling them bricks. Here the blade is a standard IB form factor module. This lets vendors do some really nice things. Get rid of PCI for one. Next get rid of internal I/O (storage, ethernet). The blade uses the IB backplane to connect to the IB fabric and thus to other blades for IPC and to I/O modules for ethernet and storage connectivity. With speeds at 2.5 Gb/s, 10 Gb/s, and 30 Gb/s you can come up with some really nice clustering applications. And you get to use a standard that many companies are backing. Now the blade just houses processors, memory, and an InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter chip or two. Moving the I/O out leaves you a lot more room. You could probably fit 8 blades or so in 3U of space. And these blades can use top shelf I/O like Gb Ethernet and 2Gb Fibre Channel where most blades today are 100 Mb ethernet and IDE or SCSI.
-- soldack
I have seen one of these things in action, and trust me, heat is no problem. If you find the Flash animation on the HP website you will see all the fans. These things are high RPM high throughput fans. They are also pretty loud, but overheating deffenitly not a prob. Might be a nice space heater though.