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...

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.

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.)

better selection of pictures here...

[turbine216]

try this link.

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

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?

"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.