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?"

Comments

The inevitable comment

[Devil's BSD]

Imagine a beowulf cluster of those...
Really, though, the fact that this blade server consumes so much less electricity would be very meaningful to me. The server room at our school was not intended to be a server room. The wiring also is lacking, and every once in a while the breakers go pop!
BTW, is it possible to use this in a laptop? Just imagine the power (or less consumption thereof) if you packed two processors in parallel on a laptop...

Pentium IIIs?

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

The usage of Pentium IIIs for these monsters of serious computing only goes to show how much of a badly designed marketing ploy the Pentium IV is.

Re:Pentium IIIs?

[Moridineas]

As a side note, from talks I've heard given by Intel engineers, their goal was definitely to up the megahertz AND overall speed. To do this, they needed to design a totally scaleable architecture. Looks like they got it right too--what's the fastest P4 today? Somewhere in the 3.0GHz range (just below I believe, and with overclocking success well about), whereas Athlon's have yet to break the 2.0GHz barrier afaik. No question mhz-for-mhz the Athlon is faster, but when it's outpaced by over 1GHz, the advantage moves back to the p4's court.

Google - Free Servers

[puto]

Well, I am sure free advertising has a lot do with the Google roll out.

The <insert powered by DELL,COMPAQ/YOMAMA) tags will start appearing all over google.

I also reckon they were free or at pretty much close to cost. Companies know what there doing. Cost on that kinda margin is probably at 200 bucks a pop straight outta the factory when you consider markup is about 500 percent on computer parts. Remember buying in bulk is power.

Example, you can get a pc on pricewatch with a 20 gig drive, 256 megs of ram, and a giga or more processor for, 250, so think about it.

Puto

Re:Google - Free Servers

[puto]

For arguments sake" I am not the worlds best computer guy". I do not claim to be, but I have been in the networking/hardware end for a long time, and can consistently make good money at it while using quality equipment.

Let me breakdown a few of the responses concerns:

Pricewatch: The best thing since sliced bread for the tech world. Price watch might be fine for the home user, a buddy, but you actually have no idea what you are getting, and why is it so cheap. RMA stuff, returns, "Fell off the Truck". So while all this transfers into savings for you and your customer, you have this problem. TechData or any of the biggies will cross ship, or ship ASAP an RMA, and you put the old one in the box. No questions asked 99.9 % of Pricewatch suppliers will not do this. Plus most of the stuff is OEM, 1 year, 90 day, 30 day warranty. I do not know about you guys but with hardware reliability being what it is these days compared to what it was years ago. I would rather pay the extra 12 bucks for the retail item and get the 3 year warranty. That way when something burns out in 91 days, I do not have an angry customer bitching at me. In the 'real'world you know part of your profit will be eaten up by service over the next two three years. So you need quality from a reputable company. Not a 20 dollar motherboard with everything built in and 1 pci slot, something burns out. You gotta replace it outta pocket because the company that has sold it to you has disappeared three days later.

I do trust NewEgg. But I can wangle better prices with some of the larger places. My new box is entirely new egg. But there is nothing generic in it either. The only el cheapo thing I buy are nics and those are lend out spares for my customers until I grab them something decent. I picked up 100 nics at 2 bucks a piece. 10/100 realtek. Sell em for six bucks, everyone is happy, and they work well.

TechData - I only mentioned Tech Data, because it is one of the largest and well knownones out there. I also use other companies. Sometimes Tech Data has really good deals on somethings and others no. Also Tech Data has different prices for different customers, all about how much you buy from them. Different prices for different people. And you can always get your rep and get them to cut you a break.

Yeah, maybe my margin was way up there, and too high. But if you are making 6%, .
1. Do not have accounts with the right companies.
2. Shouldn't be on the hardware end ( I make my money on the service end, hardware is a pain in the ass, and I do not trust anyone under 28 to build a box for my company. I trust someone who has had his hands in an XT. Computers have gotten way to easy to build in the past few, so hardware skills have dropped dramatically. I have noticed in the shops I have run that the techs 25 and under tend to RMA more burned out stuff.... Maybe cause they weren't working on them in the day when a pc cost 4 grand and take the same amount of care.
3. Do not know how to market your product to justify the price.

I honestly make all my money networking this days. I only build my personal pcs. I assess the site and order Dells, and I again I call someone at Dell. I always see on Slashdot "Yeah well on Pricewatch,Dell,HP, site here is the price" Price for who? You can call and cut deals, and if you have been in this business for any amount of time you have a nice little Rolodex with all sorts of contacts. I can usually get 12 percent knocked off Dells web price by calling. Do a little research, pick up the phone, get these dusty people skills out. My customers will buy for me on bids even if I am a few dollars higher. Why? Personality, reliability, and quality.

And the reported earning for Compaq, or whatever computer company. You thing this are actually the truth? Especially what we are seeing in business today? Enron, AOL, Anderseen? Come on! HP/Compaq employees went public with how management doctored the sheets so the merger would go through. And Compaq has been losing its ass for a long time. You actually believe all of what you read? Then give me about five minutes to throw a web page together. And for the paltry sum of 1000 dollars I will sell you a product that will make you ejaculate %5000 more, get you hot chicks, triple your earnings, and let you reliably predict the time of Cher's next facelift.

And as for people saying then why can't I build (insert company name here) server for 50%, or the company %50 less. Cause the market is price controlled, get that through your heads. Easy analogy. The GeForce Ultra Mega 10000 comes out. It costs $500. The GeForce Ultra Mega 90000 from last month drops to $99.99.

You think dell can carry all that baggage with 6 percent margins. They can with 6 percent reported margins.

I understand business and markets very well. Because I do beleive in facts and figures reported by companies. They report what they want us to hear.

Jeez it is rant Sunday for me.

Puto

Re:Honestly, no thanks

[mdechene]

Yes, and RISC processors will outperform comparable speeds of Intel and AMD chips.....But anyways, Intel's are pipelined as well, goofball. AMD just seems to do it slightly better. However why Intel outperms AMD is because they are able to jack the clock speed up better than AMD seems to be able to. I'd bet they're purposefully decreasing the effectiveness of their pipeline to boost the clock speed. Anyways, the point of the article is that Intel is making Lower Power chips. So their main counterpart would be Transmeta, or say Motorola for PPCs, or SUN, et cetera, anyone of those are players in this particular arena.

Blade... ick

[LinuxHam]

I'm currently involved in a server consolidation project where the customer has dictated that they want to see some blade. Our primary platforms are some kickin' Intel servers (8-way 1.6GHz, 8GB RAM, max 16-way 64GB) running VMWare ESX, but the customer is insisting on seeing some blade. I am personally unimpressed by them. You need to make sure that your apps can and are built to either cluster or failover cleanly when you get blade involved. Or just not run any mission critical stuff on it.

I prefer the VMWare ESX on our nearly-non-stop Intel hardware, the x440.

Re:blade server

[whereiswaldo]

Server blades also share a power supply, cables and memory

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?

Google cluster. Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I cannot believe that there are no pictures of those 10,000 x86 boxes that Google has. C'mon I bet there are at least 50% of those Google employees that check /. regularly.

Anyone?

transmeta and its applications

[goombah99]

Los Alamos has a large transmeta processor cluster on blades. It is so low power that The entire 200 blade system does not need any special cooling. It sits in an open room with offices and occupies just one ordinary rack. There are 24 blades per 3U of space sharing redundant powersupplies and built in network switches.

The really interesting thing is that as it is used it appears to be faster than the same clock speed pentium. What? you say. How can this be, since transmeta has a rep for being slow.

Well it truns out that for scientific applications, ones where you tend to sit in tight loops a lot the thing is faster. It's meta chips compile the intel instruructions into its internal processor code. Once the overhead of compiling is over its faster internally than a pentium 3

The reason it got a bad rep for being slow is that for GUI type applications where the code is running all over the place and never doing the same thing for very long, it loses out.

given the incredible stability (120 days no reboot), the increacing speed of the transmeta chips (1.2 Ghz), and the extreme low power, high density and no need for special cooling these things may revolutionize scientific and industrial computuing. But they may not dent the desktop market for raw power in GUI applications.

Re:PICMG 2.16 Is where Linux can really shine

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have any data to support this, but part of the excitement about PICMG 2.16 was that it (in principle) should allow much higher throughput than CompactPCI. I've heard vendors talk about 20+ Gb/s speeds. With potential speeds like that, I don't think anyone in this sector of the industry thinks performance will be an issue.

Each blade vendor has to build the proper magnetics onto their board. Essentially the entire blade will have a single I/O device driver: to the ethernet backplane. There are opportunities for increased reliability and performance gains because of this simplified design.

The company that designed CompactPCI and the company that designed this ethernet backplane have recently merged into one (http://www.pt.com). Also, every bigtime telco chassis manufacturer (eg. Motorola, Sun, Lucent, Intel, etc.) have bought into this technology.

So my question is... who's gonna bring this to the PC world?

so why does?

[robpoe]

I could see where it would be nice to have a bunch of dual 800 PIII boxen / taking less power input and generating less heat...

Applications?

1. Citrix farm. They're NOT disk intensive. You can do load balancing on them. If one goes down the ICA client only has to hit reconnect.
2. Web service farm. One server goes down (MS), kernel panics for some reason...remote reboot .. back up no biggy, nobody sees or knows the difference.
3. Novell (or NT) clusters. Exchange or Groupwise. Box dies / need to upgrade..
4. Home control system..Building control system. have 2-6 blades controlling different things..

there's a lot of benefit from cheap blade dual proc boxes..

like PCI, USB, etc.

[g4dget]

The notion of "open" makes sense for hardware, although it is slightly different than from software. "Open" hardware that is documented, hardware that conforms to standards, hardware that has well-defined interfaces for software, hardware that is at least licensed under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. RS232C, parallel ports, PC104, PCI, ISA, USB, IDE, etc., all can be considered reasonably open. Stuff that comes only from a single company, requires proprietary drivers, etc., is not open.

An "open" standard for blade servers would be nice. And, in fact, there are such standards: passive PCI backplanes, networking backplanes, and EuroBoards. Look around the web--there are plenty of systems to build open blade servers on--servers that are open in terms of both hardware and software.