Linux On HP Blades

HNFO writes: "HP is unveiling their new 'blade' servers that fit onto a single card. Their press release is here. They are currently available with your choice of RedHat, Debian and SuSE. A picture of the card can be found here and a picture of the chassis can be found here." If you're looking for high-density slot-based computers, earlier postings about RLX's Transmeta blades and OmniCluster's x86 variety might interest you as well.

useable for media

It may be designed for high-density, minimum use of space servers for companies, but personally, I would love to encase that puppy in a little black box and make it my media server at home. It would make a nice, neat, hardly noticeable (compared to my ugly beige Dell case - blech!) all encompassing, reconfigurable media server for piping mp3's, DVD's, mpeg's, and other digitized media to my home theatre from all over the house...

Agggh... Same image.

Blade/Chassis links to the same image, I'll try to dig up the URL for the actual chassis.

The Pictures

Did anyone else notice that the two pictures link to the exact same thing?

Will heat be a problem?

Does anyone know how much heat each if these blades will generate? Nowadays just the idea of 2 Athlons in a single tower screams "SPACEHEATER!", but what are the specs on these things? Are they made to each be really high performance, or good performance at lower power usage/heat release?

Re:Will heat be a problem?

> Does anyone know how much heat each if these
> blades will generate?

My guess is that the people who these things will be marketed for won't care how much heat they generate.

Think about it.. you're some struggling dotcom who's managed to survive the blowout and are just barely keeping your head above water. All your servers are located at a hosting firm where they charge an assload of cash for rackspace.

Here's the caveat.. they DON'T charge you for excessive power consumption or heat output. At least, they didn't a while back when I still worked in the area, I admit it could be different now. But the point is, your goal is to get as many CPU's into as few rack units as possible, and if it starts melting the rack cuz yer making so much heat, you don't care. That's the ISP's issue, because they don't charge you for cold air.

Now obviously part of the air conditioning is covered in your monthly fee, but they don't scale it based on how much heat you're making. All hosting firms worry about is ethernet drops and rack units.

What is the business model here?

Buy the razor at a reduced cost first, then pay for blade after blade after blade.

(Actually, all joking aside, this really does happen in the technology business. Especially HP! Buy the printer at a very reasonable cost and then pay big time for the stinking ink cartridges.)

better selection of pictures here...

try this link [hpservernews.com].

CompactPCI Board..

Uhh, so what? It's just another compact PCI board. Check out Force computer, Motorola, and a dozen other companies that make cPCI boards.. (and have for at least 4+ years..)

News flash: HP reinvents the compactPCI board...

Not so dense?

I like this analysis at [theregister.co.uk] , where it seems that you'll get 48 in a 40u rack. Compared to the RLX, which gets several hundred, it isn't quite so flash.

Of course having Linux available before Windows and HP-UX is interesting...

Link Correction

Go here [hpservernews.com] for links to all the Blade photos (front, back, chassis, and specialty blades).

this bests my record :(

at www.clustercompute.com [clustercompute.com] I thought I had the previous highest density record... not any more :)

Will it catch on? If so, how long will it take?

This is very cool, on many levels: space-saving, open architecture, and so forth.
And sure, there's a lot of collaboration going on behind it as the press release says, but what's the likelihood that Blades will actually be a force in server hardware? A lot of companies are worried enough about financial situations without replacing large amounts of their assets.
Just seems like a helluva risk to take, with this New Cool thing. When it DOES gain popularity, though, it'll be nice to hear success stories about physically cooler server rooms(I'd imagine) with more space for NERF combat [thinkgeek.com] or Ultimate Frisbee [rochester.edu].

Compaq

According to Cnet [cnet.com], Compaq will be offering Proliant BL series of bladed servers soon as well. According to the article, HP was able to beat Compaq and others to market with their bladed offerings because HP went with an existing CompactPCI architecture, whereas Compaq believes CompactPCI doesn't offer high enough data transfer rates for bladed servers.

My experience with a prerelease Blade

My office evaluated a Blade a little while back, since we were in the market for a new build machine to replace an aging Dell PowerEdge (dual P3-400). The Blade performed very well and was rock solid running Debian 2.2r3 (upgraded to kernel 2.4.15). However, there was little to distinguish the Blade from most of its cheaper competitors, besides its easy upgradeability. We ran some benchmarks with the department next door, and their Compaq server blew the Blade out of the water, even though they both had identical CPUs. The Blade was also kind of pokey at 3-D rendering; we think the network cards that it came with were a bit underpowered. (We use a nice 3com 10/100 switch so normally, fast streaming data coming from the server flies down the pipe.)

Overall we came to the conclusion that the Blades were novel, but overpriced and underpowered, at least for our needs. But organizations who can afford to pay extra and get very little for it won't mind the Blades.

df

disks not suitable for heavy duty applications

The biggest problem I have with these systems (and the ones from RLX) is that they put cheezy laptop hard disks on the blades. The not-so-fast 4300 RPM drives or whatever they are using now are simply not fast enough for I/O intensive tasks.

I'll stick to standard high density rackmounts for my cluster projects that need better local disk IO.

my $.02 of course

Blades are cool

What we need are PCs that come with a single, directing processor on the mainboard and a bunch of PCI slots for daughtercard machines, running an OS geared towards clustering and paralell processing. They'd be able to get a lot more oomph than the current-generation single processor machines, and a non-von-neumann architecture, with multiple processing points might finally get people out of the WIMP interface paradigm.

These Linux-running blade machines seem to be a good first step on this evolutionary path.

HP Blade?

Doesn't Sun already have a blade [sun.com]? Look out! Here come's the landsharks.

link to the high res photo

well, i didnt want to go through the whole silly 'save as' crap, so here is the link to the high res photo:

http://www.hpservernews.com/blades/photos/HPServ er bc1100_pr_01675.jpg

This thing is a joke

This product looks like dead in the water.

They need ridiculous 13U to house 16 blade servers - that's like 1.2 Severs per U.

Have a look at the RLX beasts linked in the article. Those have 24 blades in a 3 U case - that's a whopping 8 Servers per U. Now, that's "ultra density".

The HP stuff ist just ... sortof... like... ahem... dense...

f.

Management Blade

I worked on the management blade. It's based around a StrongArm 110 and runs Linux 2.4. It has no hard disk and uses a RAM disk instead. Power on to prompt in 20 secs.

Rack space cheap!

With the recent exodus (sorry) from hosting providers, is rack space all that valuable anymore? I mean, for people who aren't still stuck in contracts?

Another "blade" company not mentioned

I have a friend who works for a company here in Atlanta making "blade" systems. It's called Racemi [racemi.com] (pronounced ray-see-me).

According to my friend, they have actual customers and a shipping product, which is more than most of the other blades on the market seem to have (although I would bet HP already has preorder customers). I wonder how a big company like HP will affect the market for smaller companies like Racemi and RLX.

The Racemi box is very open-source friendly in terms of software and the like. They do a lot of the scheduling code in python, which is one of my favorite languages.

How much do these things cost anyway (any of them)? Minaturization is always expensive. Just look at the (now dead) Apple Cube. Cool, but overpriced.

Law suit waiting to happen

Good one. HP is naming a small scale server that will go directly against low end Sun Blade [sun.com] 100s and 1000s blade.

Nothing special about this

There are a lot of other companies also making blades for compactPCI.

Motorola makes a whole line of them based on the G3 and G4 chips. Nortel uses them (running linux) for their compact VoIP solutions.

Why ... limited to just SYSV?

Why is it that the Linux choices vendors offer is always limited to just SYSV style distributions? If they really believe choice is good, why not offer a real choice and include some different kinds of systems with that?

RLX vs. HP

I've evaluated the RLX chassis-based systems before, and compared to these, I think that RLX has them beat hands-down. RLX offers 3 NICs per board, less power requirements and probably equal speed.

I'm also sure that RLX costs less, unless you buy the IBM relabeled ones.

So what it comes down to is a nice first try for HP, but I'll stick with RLX until Compaq makes their entry--then I'll re-evaluate again.

All they need now:

It would be *really* cool if they'd make a laptop that would accept blades. Then you could pull a server out of the chassis and take it on the road with ya...

"Blade" hype

Single-board computers in 6U Eurocard form factors have been around for years. The new ones have turn handles, like an AT&T 5ESS switch, rather than thumbscrews, for mounting. And Compact PCI single board computers have been around for a while, too. They've been sold in small volumes for industrial automation, and overpriced for that reason, but they're not new.

Eurocard is good packaging. Industrial control, telephone COs, traffic light controllers, and Sun servers have been built that way since the 1980s.

A note on nomenclature: Eurocard is a physical packaging standard dating from 1981. Eurocards come in 3U, 6U, and 9U heights. Compact PCI generally uses 3U, VMEbus uses 3U and 6U, and Sun servers used 9U. "VMEbus" is sometimes confused with Eurocard, but there's lots of stuff in Eurocard packaging that's not VMEbus compatible. These "blade" machines are 6U Eurocard, but the signals at the back connectors are, as I understand it, network interfaces and such, not a bus.

wonder what Sun will say...

and I wonder if Sun will sue.. they have a series of workstations called Blades.

different class and slightly different market, but how does the name in another computer device affect trademarks and or copyright??

I like...

I like the "Network Switch Blade" the best.

Codemorphing for PA-RISC ?

A datasheet on hp site mentions that the blade servers support PA-RISC software, has Transmeta done a PA-RISC code morphing software or is there just another blade server modul that has a PA-RISC cpu instead of a crusoe ?
If there is a PA-RISC emulation then it should be easy to add other architectures. A crusoe based computer that could run x86, powerpc and pa-risc software would be very nice. Being able to run MacOSX on my PC from time to time would be really nice.

only marketing

i suppose they can run linux xbsd or something else on them but linux is a nice buzzword at the moment

infiniband blades

Many companies are planning to move to IB based blades. Dell for one; they are calling them bricks. Here the blade is a standard IB form factor module. This lets vendors do some really nice things. Get rid of PCI for one. Next get rid of internal I/O (storage, ethernet). The blade uses the IB backplane to connect to the IB fabric and thus to other blades for IPC and to I/O modules for ethernet and storage connectivity. With speeds at 2.5 Gb/s, 10 Gb/s, and 30 Gb/s you can come up with some really nice clustering applications. And you get to use a standard that many companies are backing. Now the blade just houses processors, memory, and an InfiniBand Host Channel Adapter chip or two. Moving the I/O out leaves you a lot more room. You could probably fit 8 blades or so in 3U of space. And these blades can use top shelf I/O like Gb Ethernet and 2Gb Fibre Channel where most blades today are 100 Mb ethernet and IDE or SCSI.

Re:Imagine a......

Really? I've been working with HP 9000 workstation and server support for several years, and have never had a problem. In fact, I've had to call on several separate issues today and each was resolved very quickly.