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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.
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...
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.)
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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.
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
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
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.
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
Good one. HP is naming a small scale server that will go directly against low end Sun Blade 100s and 1000s blade.
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
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...
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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.
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
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
Not everyone does this. Some companies do, and some companies don't You can get better support with your hard when your run FreeBSD on it from places like penguincomputing.com than you can from places like dell.com.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars