IBM´s Power6 blade

Quicksearch

Disclaimer

The individual owning this blog works for Oracle in Germany. The opinions expressed here are his own, are not necessarily reviewed in advance by anyone but the individual author, and neither Oracle nor any other party necessarily agrees with them.

Navigation

< links for 2007-11-08 | Port No. 4: dtrace for QNX Neutrino >

Thursday, November 8. 2007

The register reports about the new Power Blades. 4 GHz only, no 4,7 Ghz. And the L3 cache seems to be absent. The Power6 in the bigger systems has a 32 MB L3 cache. The datasheet on the IBM website doesn´t show any sign of this L3 cache. So the real performance of this baby will be quite interesting. I don´t think, that this blade will have a similar performance to an otherwise comparable configured pSeries.

The infos in the Register article are somewhat sparse, but the photo in the middle of the article is the most interesting: This blade is meant of enterprise computing. But they didn´t stopped the nonsense of not hot-swappable hard disks. And more problematic: Only one disk. This blade looks like a stop gap solution, as the non-existance of a Power-Blade was a nice point to hurt IBM .... Dear, IBM ... back to the blueprints, please. And have a look at our Sun Blade 6000 or 8000 chassis ...

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, The IT Business at 15:56 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: blade

, ibm

, power6

, sun

, the it business

Related entries by tags:

View as PDF: This entry | This month | Full blog

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

IBM Socket F AMD Blades also have only one disk-slot.
They are probably meant to boot from SAN (or flash, or in case of LNX, BSD or Solaris: from the net).
So, this is no surprise.
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/xseries/cog/bcls21/bcls21aag.html
Their Woodcrest Blades do have two disk-slots.
http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/xseries/cog/bchs21/bchs21aag.html

Anybody actually running the above with Solaris?

#1 Rainer (Homepage) on 2007-11-08 20:13 (Reply)

This baby doesn´t have a slot for the harddisk. You have to take out the blade, open it, and swap the disk. By the way: I don´t really like SAN/WAN/LAN-Boot. You need a really fat infrastructure when you have to boot all your blades at once after a power failure (or have a staggering boot sequence) and what´s the sense of having an ultradense blade chassis when you need additioal storage to boot the stuff. Additionally you need HBAs and FC-Switches.

The B6000 packs 10 Blades on 10U and still gives you enough boot disks. I don´t think this was a sentient design choice. When you look at the photo of the blade, it looks like an aftertought ... it look they used the residual space they found to place the disk.

#1.1 Joerg (Homepage) on 2007-11-08 20:54 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications. To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above: Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_.
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry