Smaller, cooler blades

by James Gaskin

October 24, 2006 —

Listen to the column Smaller, Cooler Blades, or visit our Podcast Center to hear more by James Gaskin.

I drove to Houston a couple of weeks ago to see HP, and take a tour of their factory where servers are stuffed into racks and cabinets. Let me start by talking about their new blade servers, and next week I'll tell you about my Factory Express tour.

You may have read about HP's new c-Class BladeSystem products, including a blade version of their outstandingly popular DL380 server. Normally a 2U box, the blade version, model BL480c, now fits in a standard blade space, making it easier to stuff even more servers and processors (two per server) into your racks. Two of the other blade servers they showed me are actually half the height of the BL480c, but don't hold as much memory (32GBs of PC2-5300 DDR2 rather than 48GBs).

Each blade server comes from overseas factories as a barebones kit. Processors, memory, and hard disks are added in Houston based on orders, not stocking levels. Unlike earlier blade servers, the new c-Class can hold one or two 2.5 inch laptop hard disks of 146GBs each. The HP folks are even working on a storage blade, with six 146GB disks on one half-size blade platform for a tiny board with a whopping 1,168GBs of raw storage, counting the two disks on the connected server.

The new blade family uses airflow equipment mounted into the blade chassis, not just the cabinet. Larger, smarter fans move more air with less electricity. HP folks report they studied 320 installations, and 96 percent of users reported savings on blade installation and setup. 60 percent say they save on cooling, and 41 percent say they're saving electricity. Again, these are HP's numbers, but they promise up to 40 percent savings on power and cooling with the new blades and racks compared to non-blade servers.

Two of the three new blades are half-sized and fit into a 2U rack space. While most blade servers look like a box for a sawblade, these new units look like they're modeled on a lawnmower blade. Long and thin is always in, and these are no exceptions. With the smaller size, you'll be able to cram four Intel Xeon or AMD Opteron 2000 series CPUs on two blades into the space of one older style blade. It will be some time before they fit into your shirt pocket, but that's the size trend.

See part 2: HP's Factory Express

ITworld.com