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Open Blade Servers?
Greg Smith points to this ZDNet story on new Intel chips aimed at blade servers, writing "Proprietary blade servers are coming on strong from IBM, Dell and HP. Where are the open blade servers? How did Google roll out 10,000 servers at such a low cost?"
Intel prepping P3 chips for blade servers
By John G. Spooner
ZDNet News
March 19, 2002
Intel is slinging new chips for blade servers.
The chipmaker will introduce on Tuesday a new low-power Pentium III chip for dense blade servers that will let computer makers put two processors onto a single blade. To date, Intel has only marketed chips for single-processor blades.
The new chip, the second of two planned low-power processors for blade servers, essentially rounds out Intel's product line. The chipmaker's first server blade chip, a 700MHz ultralow-voltage Pentium III, launched last November. The new chip runs at 800MHz, and will be available in dual-processor server blade products due later this year from Dell Computer and Fujitsu- Siemens, Intel said.
"We've got the product line across the board now that the blade market is looking for," said Lisa Hambrick, director of enterprise-processor marketing in Intel's Enterprise Processor Group.
Server blades got their name because of their design. A blade server typically resembles a circuit board more than anything else. They're made to be stacked vertically. These types of servers are growing in popularity for more mundane tasks such as delivering Web pages or housing protective firewalls because they use less floor space and electricity than racks of traditional servers.
Server blades also share a power supply, cables and memory, which further cuts down on costs and space. Although the down server market has dampened sales, analysts believe blades will eventually form a substantial part of the market.
As their name suggests, blades with ultralow-voltage processors are the smallest and least power hungry of the bunch. Typically, a six-foot-tall rack can accommodate up to 42 1.75-inch thick servers. Some blade-server cabinets with ultralow-voltage processors can fit 100 or more servers in the same size rack.
While the new chips consume more power, they provide enhanced performance features. Aside from its dual- processor capabilities and faster clock speed, the new 800MHz server blade chip offers a faster 133MHz system bus and supports a larger amount of faster memory, compared with Intel's current low-voltage server blade chip. The new chip can support up to 4GB of PC 133 memory, otherwise known as SDRAM (synchronous dynamic RAM), which is the most common DRAM type available today. The other chips could handle only 2GB of memory at a time.
The new chip also consumes less power than a typical Pentium III or Xeon server chip would--about 11.2 watts-- allowing PC makers to create a dual-processor server blade that uses less power and produces less heat.
Some of the first ultradense blade server makers used Transmeta's Crusoe chip, which consumed less power than Intel's 700MHz Pentium III chip for blades.
However, the chips did not offer dual-processor support or certain features generally expected of servers, such as error-correcting code memory. Corporate IT buyers also balked at buying servers based around a new chip in an era of tighter budgets, according to executives at server companies promoting Transmeta-based servers. As a result, vendors such as RLX Technologies--Transmeta's original blade customer--have begun offering products based on Intel chips as well.
Meanwhile, Sun Microsystems is also expected to launch a pair of blade-server lines, one based on Intel's chips and another on its own UltraSparc processor.
Both Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer offer server blades based on Intel's 700MHz blade-server chip. PC makers such as Dell are expected to adopt the chip in products that will begin shipping in the next two to three months, Intel said.
The new 800MHz chip, which uses ServerWorks' LE3 chipset, will list for $289 each in 1,000 unit quantities
As if ZDNet would get slashdotted. Dont even THINK about modding this one up.
If you're too lazy to read the article and don't know what a blade server is...
Server blades got their name because of their design. A blade server typically resembles a circuit board more than anything else. They're made to be stacked vertically. These types of servers are growing in popularity for more mundane tasks such as delivering Web pages or housing protective firewalls because they use less floor space and electricity than racks of traditional servers. Server blades also share a power supply, cables and memory, which further cuts down on costs and space. Although the down server market has dampened sales, analysts believe blades will eventually form a substantial part of the market.
Maybe I'm retarded, but I didn't immediately picture exactly what a blade server was when I saw the name...so there it is.
What, you mean like Open Hardware?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Blade servers are not supposed to be stacked vertically, and you can fit *way* more than 42 blade servers in a single rack. The author is thinking of 1U boxes, which have only been around for say... 10 years!
i ndex-bl.html
look at : http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/platforms/
280+ servers in a rack.
While I won't argue about the Pentium IV being designed around the need to advertise a higher clock speed (irregardless of what that means in terms of actual computing power), the Pentium III is a more mature design, and benefits from lots of improvements to its power consumption. In a blade server, power consumption is one of the main issues, thus using a PIII doesn't necessarily mean that they wouldn't use a Pentium IV if they could get away with it - they just can't afford the power/heat issues.
Now consider that fact with laptops using the P4 - that's one area where they can get away with it, at the cost of battery life...
The article is quite old now - March 19 - and HP appears to favour the blade servers from the former compaq. That being said the advantage that blade servers give is that they save a great deal of space, and make cabling much easier. In essence you can stuff a lot of proccessors in a rack, also put in a small disk farm, network switch using copper or fiber, and away you go.
Semper ubi sub ubi
Where Linux will really shine is the new PICMG-2.16 standard. It's an enhancement/alternative to CompactPCI where a chassis uses Ethernet signalling on the backplane instead of CompactPCI signals. That means a single chassis can have an intel, Sun, and/or motorola blade in the same chassis and they communicate via TCP/IP instead of hardware-specific signalling. It also means that a Linux-based blade can work in *any* manufacturers chassis. This removes a big barrier of entry for the Linux in the telecom market.
Other cool things about PICMG 2-16 Blades:
- Blades (like ethernet hosts) are more easily hot-swappable
- Depending on the chassis switch, bus speeds could approach 24GB/s in the near future
- Device drivers need only speak TCP/IP (one driver works on multiple blade operating systems)
For more info see: The Next Big Thing (pdf) and there might be something here since these guys designed part of the spec.500 % markup huh? I would still be in the hardware business if it was. You're way off.. Mod -3 uninformed and wrong.
Basically the entire hardware industry runs off slim margins.
I heard Dell runs at about 6%. Most distributors run a 1-2% margin, computer stores anywhere from 5-10%.
As for the manufacturers, I haven't a clue, but they must have astronomical costs.
Buying in bulk isn't that big of a deal anymore. When a company goes ITQ (invitation to quote) the vendors know they aren't going to win unless they at least halve their markup.
From there, they figured out a functional failover system and set up four geographically distributed data centers.
Oh, and they coded up a search engine thing at the same time.
AMD chips with officially supported 166 mhz FSB will be ariving shortly. The revamped thoroughbred "b" core can run at a 166 mhz FSB and the 2100 mhz XP 2600 has a 16x multiplier. That is a 2.6 ghz Athlon or a 3400+ in AMD speak.
Now if these were actually real chips and not paper launches, it woudl all mean something.
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True Open Standard Blade Servers are just around the corner. Up until now the current offerings by RLX, HP and IBM have been proprietary blade server designs. The next generation blade servers will be based on an open hardware standards where different vendors blades can be swapped with each other the same way that Compact-PCI is a standard blade design where all cpu boards are interchangeable with each other.
Low power CPU's are needed for the current crop of blade server designs since they forgot to deal with any heat management. The current blade designs rely entirely on airflow across the cpu package for cooling in a 2U or 3U high blade with 0.7" between each blade. Oops!!... how many blades can you stuff into a rack with each processor pulling 30 - 60 watts each and keep the temp down to 1K cpus per 42U rack) while still using Xeon and other x86 processors that produce over 60W of heat each.
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
I'm running an athlon 2GHz (2400+) as we speak.
First of all, the power consumption of an AMD XP running 1600Mhz (or even a 1600+) uses significantly more power than two of these 800Mhz CPU's. Talking about one CPU is one thing, but 40? Or 200? Now you're talking about enough heat generated to cause spontaneous combustion. Low power is a good thing.
Also, it is not just the Mhz that determines the usefulness of a given configuration. Case in point, for many large multi-user database applications the number of concurrent processes (so many per CPU based on the app itself) that the system can do is much more important than the clock speed of the CPU's. Hence the need for dual, quad and oct servers and clustering with shared storage.
Moekandu
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Open source is just one aspect of open computing. Think of open computing as a game anyone can play.
From what I understand, in the old days, DEC made computers, and software for those computers, and terminals that users could use to connect to those computers. (There was a time, remember, when multi-user computers were the norm...) Anyway, they published documentation about the terminals. So others tried to make cheap clones of the terminals. But, they found out that some of the DEC software used undocumented features of the terminals. So, the clone terminals were useless with that software, and effectively useless overall. That's closed computing. It may have been an evil business strategy, or maybe just laziness on the part of the engineers and/or technical writers, but either way, there was a barrier that prevented others from playing the game.
Now, here's an example of open computing: Think all SPARC processors are Sun products? Actually, they're not. Go have a look at http://www.sparc.org/ . SPARC is actually an organization that defines the processor architecture, and anyone who wants to make one can license it and do. Sun has licensed it (and admittedly is very heavily involved!), but so have Fujitsu and others.
The point is the SPARC situation is the exact opposite. The situation is set up so that anyone who wants to play, can.
By the way, when it comes to PC hardware, "open" usually means that the guts are designed to be interchangeable, so that you can buy a bunch of components and build your own (or upgrade your own). If the design is proprietary, one company's parts are not going to fit with another's.
Not quite. Sun's LX50 mentions support for the three Ultra3 SCSI hard drives, as does the 1RU 1000, but the 1RU 1000 also has two internal drivebays for ATA hard drives, which Sun doesn't mention. All in all, I think they are about as similar as any other 1U server out there.
cnn article
infoworld article
Here's a link directly to a page w/in LANL and just for the heck of it a little something from google.
Standard Disclaimer + I work for RLX.
just to nitpick...
After all, the reason for a dual processor is to gain more processing power and speed, but a dual processor 800 meg chip will not perform as well as a simple single processor 1600 mhz chip and is more complex to program for.
Well, it depends. Well written web applications under a moderate to heavy load tend to perform better under the multi-processor configuration. More complex to program for? Yessss....scalability often is.
meh.
How did Google roll out 10,000 servers at such a low cost?
Certainly not by using blade servers. Contrary to popular belief, blade servers cost more tran their non-blade equivalents. Just like notebooks vs. laptops. Their selling points are (in some vendors' opinions) integrated management and supposed flexibility.
1. Start with a 24" rack, 72" tall. Rip the doors off the front and back.
2. Get sheet-metal 24" trays to fit into the rack. Mount them every 2U, on both the front and back of the rack. Leave a few U open in the middle of the rack for your switch and KVM.
3. Contract a company to build you custom power supplies that are 1U tall, use 90w of power, and only have 1 ATX connector and 1 molex hookup for a hard drive.
4. Put two Tyan dual-PIII mini-ATX motherboards w/ onboard LAN and video side-by-side on each tray. Slap two 1ghz PIII's in there with good passive heatsinks. Add a small amount of RAM (128-256mb) and strap a 10-20gb hard drive to the free space on the tray using a velcro strap.
5. Cluster 'em up! Heat is a HUGE problem, even with using the relatively-cold PIII's instead of P4's or Athlon MP's.
After seeing the Ashburn facility in person a year or so ago, I figured out that it would have cost about $700 per node to build the cluster. Considering it was an approximately 960-node setup, it was most likely around $700,000 for the 1920-processor cluster. That's REALLY freakin' cheap!
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
One major limiting factor is a 500W per square foot limit in most hosting facilities (that's why a lot of their systems are still PIII based). But if a low-power blade cost only 20% more per "MIP", it might still be cheaper to pay the server facility for the extra cooling and power.
They said the HP/IBM/Dell salesmen just cry because there's no way those vendors can compete with the cheapest daily far-East motherboard import prices. The only salesmen who must like Google are the ones who sell them the diesel locomotives (err. backup power generators) when they exceed the power limit of some hosting facility.