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Build Your Own Blade Server
fw3 writes "Information week is reporting
that IBM and Intel are opening up the standards for the eServer BladeCenter. 'The companies will make available the design specifications for IBM's eServer BladeCenter product... hardware vendors can build "BladeCenter compatible" networking switches, blade adapter cards, and appliance and communications blades for enterprise networks.' Not really a new strategy for IBM, ISA of course was open from the start, IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC. Looking further back I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports. (Of course IBM *didn't* share the details of OS/360, leaving RCA with a box but no OS.) See also stories from EETimes, CNN."
I would sure hate to be cat when the VPs read the heading I am sure something was kicked. Sun needs to read the writing on the wall, newspaper, toilet paper, everywhere - consumers are seeking alternatives from proprietary. Sun's Blade should have been the one in this heading yet they are happy chugging along while companies move forward. Sun is growing Dim.
As for IBM and the RCA scandal, where is the OS/360 today. I wonder if it would have had deeper market penetration if IBM had extended the OS to RCA? Could basically going proprietary with the OS been less successful rather than opening it?
I'm suprised there's no Wesley Snipes tie-in with this product. It would seem natural.
"Blades- the only thing between you, and the end of the world"
Just hope that HP and Sun follow lead and will make things a little easier.
Thus far you could somehow mix'n'match components for standard servers (rack mountable or not), but blades were like hacking a SOHO router...
Wonder how fast will the component manufacturers respond to this and start making parts available (i.e. - we will stop paying exuberant prices for replacement parts from the big guys...)
get a free ipod! This really works... 4 more GMail invites still available for signing up...
Looks like mainframes could be getting cheaper if more companies get their hands on manufacturing them. Looks like Microsoft will have to find a different way to inflate the TCO of running Linux than the current strategy: running Windows 2003 Server on an e-Machine versus Linux on Giant Fucking Mainframe 7000 on the single processor kernel.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Well this does seem to open up a new market for clone blade servers, but I'm just not sure who would actually purchase one.
Chances are, if you're going to be spending that kind of money on a server, you're probably going to want something from a reputed vendor, with good support, etc.
Image a beowulf cluster of blade servers...
---
Those who can, do
Those who can't, teach
Those who don't know how, supervise
> IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the
> engineering data needed to build a PC
Yeah, after plenty of legal action!
IBM's technical references for the original PCs contained nearly all of the engineering data needed to build a PC.
Except for one of the key components to make a PC: the "Build your own BIOS" reference.
The ways of gods are mysteriously indistinguishable from chance.
Try running your OS/360 programs on your brand new zSeries box. Apparently they'll run fine. Of course in the mid-80s (2 decades after OS/360 appeared) IBM pretty much owned the mainframe market and most serious jobs needed a mainframe, so I don't think OS/360 did too badly.
In soviet russia stale jokes recycle you!
5. IBM lets 2-bit startup company run by a huge asshat control the OS...
This was probably the same model they had in mind for the PC. They wanted to use commodity hardware and even encourage clone makers because they knew that would help allow them to match hardware prices of other high-volume competitors. They figured that they would maintain control of the platform through their proprietary BIOS, and that any clone manufacturers would have to license the BIOS from IBM.
Software vendors would write to the BIOS calls, and IBM would command a position akin to the present-day Microsoft, where they would be the arbiter of the standard interface between application software and hardware. That may explain why they outsourced the DOS OS to Microsoft; they may have thought of it as just a layer over the BIOS. They knew that versions of DOS that ran over other low-level APIs (of which there were a few examples) wouldn't be quite compatible enough to become popular, so they didn't bother to get exclusive control of DOS.
Unfortunately for IBM, the BIOS wasn't that hard to reverse engineer in a clean room environment, clones of the BIOS enabled Microsoft to sell 100% compatible versions of DOS to anyone, and the rest was history.
I guess the lesson to be learned is that if you're going to use software to maintain control over a commodity hardware market, make sure that the software is too crufty and complex to reverse engineer in a reasonable amount of time.
...since stone age! Make way Apple, Sun & friends, Stone-Age-Advanced-Blade-Server-Made-in-the-baseme nt-Out-of-Piles-of-Crap is comming .. fast!
The IBM PC-AT spec opened the door to the commodity "PC" industry. The spec was detailed, and useful, enough for cloners to copy the PC, and the power of competition to drive the vast deployment of cheap PC hardware worldwide. Spawning not only Microsoft and Linux, but the Internet as we (think we) know it today. Especially in light of the obstacles to innovation domino effect we have today, like business process patents, domain name squatting, and every other "legal engineering" trick, IBM's PC-AT spec publication was a work of technology heroism.
But of course, every silver lining has its cloud. For example, the PC-AT spec didn't specify exactly where the motherboard screw holes must appear. So not only were there incompatible motherboard/chassis combinations, but the kluges to accomodate the differences made many cheap boxes significantly more expensive for manufacturers on a volume basis. Just an example of how the 80% solution can spawn its own problems, that require 80% more time to solve. Let's hope we've learned from the last watershed spec publication, and get all the details in the new blade server specs. Especially if we're all going to use them.
--
make install -not war
or do, see for yourself
When it left, it went from Michigan to Georgia, then on boat to Taiwan, where it's probably polluting groundwater to this day.
IIRC RCA wasn't the only company to mimic IBM's systems as I thought that was the business model for Amdahl.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
facinating.
This should make it somewhat easier to build a Blade computer, hence, it would appear that IBM Blade-compatible appearing on Blade servers for the next 5 years is the goal.
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
Here is what you need to know about the BIOS, and why the parent is a troll.
Remember, this is Wikipedia, so click "edit this page" and improve the article!
IBM has historically been a friend of open hardware standards?
If they're trying to make that point.. well, it's just historical revisionism.
Yes, ISA was open. That's why IBM tried to push the MicroChannel bus architecture.
As for mainframes.. IBM invented what we now call FUD to battle Honeywell and Amdahl and the like.
And I'd like to see someone try and build a mainframe clone today. IBM has some seriously secret stuff in those boxes. My father is a mainframe veteran, and he knows some of this stuff. He can't say what, though, because he's under an NDA.
So if you're trying to float the idea that IBM builds hardware to open specifications and always has.. you're just wrong.
I've built some very dense blades (for off the self hardware) and for very CHEAP money. I need to see better blades. I could produce a 2 amd system in a 1u, which is great for high cpu hosting (like online gaming).
In the end I found it cheaper to just rent servers, and let the isp worry about the space. But if I owned a datacenter, I would be building my own racks.
open the specs, lets get back to building render farms.
1. Open blade server specs
2. ????
3. Profit!!!
because what hunting rifle has a bayonet lug
Actually OS/360 was "open source". In fact, it was never even copyrighted. I have the entire source on CD-ROM. Anybody can get it at http://www.cbttape.org.
OS/360 had two flavors. MFT and MVT. MVT became SVS when it had virtual storage added on. MVS was in parallel development and once stable replaced SVS. Again, virtual storage. MVS was replaced by MVS/XA when the addressing scheme was changed from 24 bit to 31 bit. MVS/XA was replaced by MVS/ESA along with changes in the I/O architecture. MVS/ESA was replaced by OS/390. OS/390 is in the process of being replaced by z/OS. z/OS is the "flagship" decendant of OS/360. Most programs written for OS/360 will still run on z/OS today. z/OS also has an integrated "UNIX" personality so that it is possible (but not easy) to port UNIX code to z/OS. I have done this with GNU make, gzip, and bzip2 myself. And I'm not an expert in C either! z/OS is fully 64 bit capable on the latest eServer zSeries mainframes. That's 64 bits of addressing and data in registers. At the same time it is fully backward with the older 31 and 24 bit address and 31 bit data registers.
Unfortunately, unlike the original OS/360, z/OS is almost 100% "closed" source. It is even written in a proprietary language with IBM does not license to the general public.
I mean really? I have this vague idea... but what is a good explanation of a blade?
All explanations I've ever seen never really explain in... its almost as if they don't have a clue but don't want to feel stupid and not know the answers.
If this is the one I'm thinking of, RCA's machine (somewhere along the line) was called the "Spectra 70". They wrote their own OS, designed around time sharing terminal users, vs. the batch design of OS/360. The New York City Board of Higher Education had one back in the early 70's, when I was a CS student. It used the same instruction set, but the one I used had unique extensions for virtual memory, so the software wasn't cross-compatible. I think I still have a manual for it around somewhere.
OS/360 begat MVS begat OS/390 begat zOS, which is the current product for IBM mainframes (now called "zSeries"). Hitachi, Amdahl, and others made compatible hardware for a while once IBM unbundled the software, but I think the only players left in that market are IBM and a couple of emulators.
...they open up the specs for creating viruses and spreading them onto the Internet.
Oh... wait...
I think your talking about the MicroChannel architecture(MCA) in the early PS/2 series while much of the rest of the industry pushed E-ISA and later PCI. The telling thing to me was that at the time E-ISA came out an issue of Byte magazine ran a tech article that talked about everyting from signal timeing in the bus on up while an article (another month) about MCA talked about it being a "16-lane superhiway in you PC". IBM was all about propritary hardware at the time.
I've been told by a reputable source that RCA was able to fully duplicate the System 360 System/360, mainframe working just a month behind IBM's own schedule by using IBM's published tech reports.
Sony tried to copy the IBM PS/2 using the same principles it just took them 14 years.
Heck of an improvement though...
Get your Unix fortune now!
I learned how to program computers on one of these dinosaurs when I was in high school. It was a IBM System/360 clone without the reliability of a real IBM system. It supported TOS (Tape Operating System) and DOS (Disk Operating System). The school board bought one system and put a teletype and dataphone (110 bps modem) in each high school. It supported RPG, COBOL, Dartmouth BASIC and Waterloo FORTRAN. It wasn't a bad system if you ignored the fact that its MTBF was about 1 hour.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
They shared OS/360 with everyone at the same time. OS/360 wasn't copyrighted, and was distributed in source form - in fact, to install it, you had to start with a small pregenerated system and completely assemble everything from the ground up. OS/360 was open source when open source wasn't cool - it was just the way everybody did things.
The RCA "compatible" mainframe was compatible only at the problem program level. OS programs (supervisor state code) were markedly different because the I/O subsystem wasn't even close to being compatible.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
InfoWorld says the chassis and management module aren't open. So people can buy cheap blades... and still have to buy from IBM the box where to plug them.
If you have used the IBM blade frame, i really wouldn't understand why anyone would want to copy it. I have never seen such downtime. Posting as an anonymmous coward so that my employeer doesn't fire me.
this is my blade server.
free online diet tracking.
The truth is Sun just does whatever the hell it feels like. Their engineers have two bosses, themselves, and whatever the current customer base asks for -- the market and analysts be damned. It's like here's everybody doing their thing, chasing after each other, and over here, is Sun. It's in its own little world. Oracle is a lot like that too.
And that can be both good, and bad.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
How much you wanna bet it looks a hell of a lot like pascal or C built on assembler macros?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
A lot of the stuff on the web can be traced to one or two inaccurate sources. People don't correct the record because it's difficult to find original source material.
Example: The Cray-2 is frequently described as being cooled by artificial blood plasma, and most of those descriptions derive from the computer-history museum.
However, the exact chemical is not named, so it's difficult to figure out whether it was the same chemical that was later used as the oxygen carrier in artificial blood. Blood plasma performs a all-together different physiological function.
I believe IBM sued Compaq (and lost), so there might be some truth in the trial records. It might clear up exactly who was responsible for the BIOS reengineering effort (Some sources imply that Compaq subcontracted the work out to Phoenix) and how the reverse engineers developed their model of the BIOS.
The money we would have spent with lawyers we can now invest in our product."
'nough said.
AIK
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/02/1 424203&threshold=-1&tid=137&tid=136
:)
Contrast is a good thing.
A 1U rackmountable server is not a "blade". Look up IBM Blade Center and the HS20 blades. There are 14 dual-CPU blades plus two full-Gigabit switches and four power supplies in a 7U chassis.
Back in the mainframe days - which is when I got my start in the biz - OS/360 and OS/370 (up to OS/MVS V7) were open source. The source was distributed on microfiche, and system programmers were encouraged to modify the code to make the whole thing run better. There was a user organization called the Society to Help Avoid Redundant Effort (SHARE) at which system programmers shared their code modifications with each other, and with the IBM developers. Some of the good stuff made its way back into the standard "distro" - although we didn't call it that back then.
Similarly, the hardware diagrams were standard manuals that existed in every datacentre. I remember browsing through them shortly after I finished school (a hundred years ago or so) and thinking, "there really isn't much to these mainframe computers; nothing much more than the final exam in electronics." But based on those diagrams, and other info, our datacentre was the first in the world to put the 9th megabyte on an S 370/168!
And yes, at the time, I did get questioned about how on earth we could have so much work that we needed a 9th megabyte on a 168.
www.pichunter.com :) enjoy :) :) :) Yes, it's the best, I want gmail!
Amd and Sun and 64 bit chips supper 8 way machines.
Intel and Sun the Xeron nice 32 bit machines.
Basicly Sun saw this coming.
So not really a problem.
I was expecting to set that someone had woken up and cloned the blade server.
It is not that hard. 2 boards with hardrives doing a network based raid(ie if one board dies the other picks up the slack). Other board connected by 1g network to drive booting from network(no hardrive if card fail cluster backup).
Note the new amd 64 motherboards with 2g network ports would rock one internal drive and data stream 1 data stream between boards.
Now the problem here is the power supplys a double and removeable powersupply while running.
Advantage of the shelf parts all bar the powersupplys. So something breaks I can nick the desktop board any use that. Most techs have 2 machine at there work point.
The license specifically excludes patents and patent applications. Thus, IBM and Intel can retain control over the technology through their vast patent portfolio.
> Didn't OS/400 (on the AS/400 aka iSeries) also evolve from OS/360?
No.
OS/400 evolved from the OS used on the System/36 and System/38 minis. The OS/360 contemporary would have been a thing called System 3.
Nothing to do with S/360 - totally different architecture.
I was _hoping_ it would have been based on something else.