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.

Comments

useable for media

[cavemanf16]

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...

The Pictures

[fizz-beyond]

Did anyone else notice that the two pictures link to the exact same thing?

Will heat be a problem?

[ThatComputerGuy]

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?

Re:Will heat be a problem?

[Xzzy]

> Does anyone know how much heat each if these
> blades will generate?

My guess is that the people who these things will be marketed for won't care how much heat they generate.

Think about it.. you're some struggling dotcom who's managed to survive the blowout and are just barely keeping your head above water. All your servers are located at a hosting firm where they charge an assload of cash for rackspace.

Here's the caveat.. they DON'T charge you for excessive power consumption or heat output. At least, they didn't a while back when I still worked in the area, I admit it could be different now. But the point is, your goal is to get as many CPU's into as few rack units as possible, and if it starts melting the rack cuz yer making so much heat, you don't care. That's the ISP's issue, because they don't charge you for cold air.

Now obviously part of the air conditioning is covered in your monthly fee, but they don't scale it based on how much heat you're making. All hosting firms worry about is ethernet drops and rack units.

Re:Will heat be a problem?

[morcheeba]

This thread has 5 replies and no one has an answer yet?

On the data sheet (there's a nice link in the article, I'm sure you can find it), you'll find the specs you're looking for:
Capable of 50 Watts per slot.
Single Pentium III 700 MHz, 512 MB ECC (PC100), 30GB IDE 2.5" HD, cPCI hot swap, dual 10/100base-T.
smart temperature monitor and failsafe circuitry

So, it's just good performance, not ultra-high.

What is the business model here?

[webword]

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.)

Re:Agggh... Same image.

[InnereNacht]

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."

better selection of pictures here...

[turbine216]

try this link.

CompactPCI Board..

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

this bests my record :(

[jacquesm]

at www.clustercompute.com I thought I had the previous highest density record... not any more :)

Compaq

[RedX]

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.

My experience with a prerelease Blade

[Anonymous Coward]

My office evaluated a Blade a little while back, since we were in the market for a new build machine to replace an aging Dell PowerEdge (dual P3-400). The Blade performed very well and was rock solid running Debian 2.2r3 (upgraded to kernel 2.4.15). However, there was little to distinguish the Blade from most of its cheaper competitors, besides its easy upgradeability. We ran some benchmarks with the department next door, and their Compaq server blew the Blade out of the water, even though they both had identical CPUs. The Blade was also kind of pokey at 3-D rendering; we think the network cards that it came with were a bit underpowered. (We use a nice 3com 10/100 switch so normally, fast streaming data coming from the server flies down the pipe.)

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

disks not suitable for heavy duty applications

[chris.dag]

The biggest problem I have with these systems (and the ones from RLX) is that they put cheezy laptop hard disks on the blades. The not-so-fast 4300 RPM drives or whatever they are using now are simply not fast enough for I/O intensive tasks.

I'll stick to standard high density rackmounts for my cluster projects that need better local disk IO.

my $.02 of course

Re:disks not suitable for heavy duty applications

[NerdSlayer]

The biggest problem I have with these systems (and the ones from RLX) is that they put cheezy laptop hard disks on the blades. The not-so-fast 4300 RPM drives or whatever they are using now are simply not fast enough for I/O intensive tasks


One of my good friends works as a chip designer for Dell. We were talking over beers last weekend about how Dell is coming out with the same thing soon, only with the option of having either the cheezy laptop drives OR a normal sized SCSI drive. You'll be able to choose between density or speed.

This thing is a joke

[frost22]

This product looks like dead in the water.

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 ... sortof... like... ahem... dense...

f.

Management Blade

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Rack space cheap!

[Computer!]

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?

Law suit waiting to happen

[lelitsch]

Good one. HP is naming a small scale server that will go directly against low end Sun Blade 100s and 1000s blade.

"Blade" hype

[Animats]

Single-board computers in 6U Eurocard form factors have been around for years. The new ones have turn handles, like an AT&T 5ESS switch, rather than thumbscrews, for mounting. And Compact PCI single board computers have been around for a while, too. They've been sold in small volumes for industrial automation, and overpriced for that reason, but they're not new.

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.