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Open Blade Servers?

Posted by timothy on from the extensible dept.

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?"

11 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. blade server by rob-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:blade server by John+Paul+Jones · · Score: 5, Informative

      Normally, redundancy is a high priority. Is the savings in hardware and electricity worth the risk of losing (say) 10 machines because one power supply failed?

      Blade servers are akin to modular switches and routers. All servers share a backplane, delivering power and network connectivity, both within the chassis and to network patch panels. Some solutions have break out boxes that permit KVM access to individual blades, while others run that through the backplane as well. Redundant power isn't the issue, since the backplane usually has redundant power; the issue is that these servers usually don't have multiple hard drives, so redundant disk isn't possible per blade. There are some that do have mirrorsets, they are less dense than the single-disk models.

      The use of blades is normally for webserving, thin client servers, etc, where the failure of a single blade simply decreases the capacity of the overall farm, rather than rendering a service unavailable.

      The best designs implement SAN HBAs into the backplane, providing common disk to all devices, and with netbooting, the devices won't need local disk at all. That's probably going to be the future of compute farms...

      -JPJ

      --
      Feh.
  2. Re:Open What? by Istealmymusic · · Score: 4, Informative

    What, you mean like Open Hardware?

    --
    "The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
  3. whoever wrote this artlcle is on crack. by jba · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

    look at : http://www.compaq.com/products/servers/platforms/i ndex-bl.html

    280+ servers in a rack.

    1. Re:whoever wrote this artlcle is on crack. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, you can fit more than 42 blade servers in a single rack. Good thing the article SAID that you can fit 100 or more in a rack. 42 servers was referring to traditional single unit high servers, the market blades is in many cases replacing.

      Read the article before commenting.

  4. Re:Pentium IIIs? by silentbozo · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  5. Old Article by hopbine · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  6. PICMG 2.16 Is where Linux can really shine by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  7. Re:Google - Free Servers by Ferrule · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. How Google did it by faster · · Score: 5, Informative
    First, they planned to use a distributed architecture from the beginning. Then they used cheapo machines until the reliability started costing more than it saved, and then they started buying Rackable Systems boxes. 1U, half-depth, 82 to a cabinet with a hub (or was it a switch?) at the top on each side.

    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.

  9. Re:transmeta and its applications by buffy · · Score: 4, Informative
    For more information about the Green Destiny:

    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.