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Linux On HP Blades

Posted by timothy on from the windows-to-follow dept.

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.

5 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. What is the business model here? by webword · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. better selection of pictures here... by turbine216 · · Score: 5, Informative

    try this link.

  3. Compaq by RedX · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. My experience with a prerelease Blade by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

  5. disks not suitable for heavy duty applications by chris.dag · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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