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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?"
I got an ad for AMD server solutions for that story..
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
A blade server is a hardware product, it really has nothing todo with software, outside of the Operating System Clustering/Scaling functionality.
Google does not use blade servers, last I knew it was just a large amount of x86 boxes running Linux.
Open Source hardware? Does that even make sense? Either have drivers (or release the specs) that allow your hardware to be used on an Open Source operating system, or dont.
Want an "Open Source Blade Server"? Yeah, thats called an HP with Clustered Linux on each blade...
That could be dangerous. Over 50 people* die per month in server blade accidents. Sadly, these needless deaths could've been prevented by simple server blade cover kits.
Only YOU can prevent fatal server room mishaps.
Keep those blades covered, kids.
This is a public service message brought to you by Sally Shark, official mascot for server room safety.
*note: statistics may be fictional.
Not really...
Intel knows that they cant get the P4's power consumption low enough to hit the numbers, so they use a P3.
Blade servers are already marketed by everyone that makes them as "a tad slower, but much more energy effecient", and the main goal is better density, to allow more power in the given space. The Pentium III fits this bill perfectly.
Intel is smart enough to know that the P4 isnt everything. Engineering > Marketing, whenever that happens, its a good thing!
Is it bad to when you see stuff like this to think how you can use it to further boost your Setiathome scores
..........FULL STOP.
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
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.
Intelligent Life on Earth
We won't see open blade servers for quite a while, if ever. Normal servers are only "open" because they use a common set of interconnects (standard power, ps/2 keyboard, 100BaseT), etc. On a blade server, you have to unify all of those interconnects in a hot-swappable fashion. The result? A customized connector and backplane architecture.
In addition, there's no incentive for companies to open a standard for blade servers - they'll make more money by selling the chassis and blades, as well as the management software that is generally required for these types of servers.
As far as Google goes, they rolled out their infrastructure for such a low cost because they did the following things:
1) didn't use blade servers(more on that in a sec)
2) bought in large quantities
3) bought generic/semi-generic servers (by which I mean "not IBM")
Not using blade servers was a sharp idea because the real advantages of blade servers come in certain particular situations. These include where power/heat/space is really expensive or where you need a lot of hosts without a lot of performance (like QA, staging and development environments). Remember, that while they use less space, power, etc., they also use laptop/low-power cpus and hard drives, so the performance can be lower, especially for i/o intensive operations. If you're not hugely space-constrained, using 1U servers will save you money in the long run.
Thanks,
Matt
me@mzi.to
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.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.