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Many people think about blades as the best way to put many small servers in a small amount of space. Often this is the case, but not in every case. Last weekend i did some research for a project and found out something interesting in the offering of our competitor HP.

Let´s assume you have the requirement to use a quad processor blade. So you need one of the full height blades of HP the two disks of the blade aren´t sufficent your you. You need more of them. Our beloved competitor has a blade shelf for this. It´s called HP StorageWorks SB40c storage blade. It´s a half height blade.

Okay, let´s calculate a little bit. You could put 16 half height blades and 8 full heigt blades into a 10 rack units c7000 blade enclosure. Okay, we need some bays for the storage. You would assume that you can put 5 full height blades into the system and 5 storage blades in the free remaning bays (leaving one free) into the system, but this isn´t the case. The storage blades have to be adjactent to the blade. More important, you can put it only in the lower bay.

A half-height SB40c storage blade must be installed within the same partition as its partner server
blade. If the SB40c is partnered with a full-height server blade, the SB40c must be installed in the
lower bay adjacent to the full-height server blade. The HP BladeSystem Enclosure Tech Brief states:

You could put a server into the free bay above the storage bay but there is an interesting gem in the documentation. The quick spec document states at the HP website states:

NOTE: The lower tape or storage blade cannot be removed without first removing the upper half height blade.

The problem, as far as i understand the datasheet of the SB40c it isn´t just a bunch of cabling. It has an own RAID-Controller( HP Smart Array P400 with 256MB Battery Backed-Write Cache). It´s an active component and there is some likelihood that active components will fail, especially when they contain batteries.

Let´s assume you have used the slot above the Storageblade for another system. Let´s assume you have to service the storage blade. You have to shut down the perfectly running system on the blade above the storage blade, as you have to remove it first. Doesn´t sound reasonable for enterprise usage. This leads me to the conclusion that you you use the c7000 enclosure only for 4 full height quad socket blades with 4 storage blades and nothing else.

Okay, that implies that you need 10 rack units (the size of the c7000 enclosure) to implement 4 quad socket systems with 3-8 disks with the HP blades. Now let´s look at the problem from a different perspective: The Sun Fire X4450 is a quad socket socket server with up to 8 harddisks (with more PCIe-slots than a blade). The system takes rack units in you rack. So you could place 5 of them at 10 Rack units. Sometimes the denser solution is at a place where you don´t expect it.

In my opinion the blade systems from Sun were the most misunderstood products on the marketplace. Do you remember the B1600 blade system? 16 small blades on 3 Rack units. You were able to run large amounts of them in very small place. There were not fast, but they were designed to really enable the customer to densly pack servers, not playing this "thermal death gamble". Talk with customers of the 1st and 2nd generation blade systems. Some customer still use them and they would like to kill the sales rep of the descision to kill the B1600. The market at whole didn´t understood the product and bought products that fried themself in their cooking ... err ... blade centers.

The blade system dubbed Andromeda a.k.a. Sun Blade 8000 Modular Server System has a similar problem, but not at the extend as the B1600. They were designed with a certain idea: bringing enterprise into the blades. 4 sockets and the capablity to use PCIe gives you a whole lot opportunties to use blades in areas, your wasn´t able to do so before. It was a little bit tedious to explain the customers, why we say "No, our blades are not to big, the others are to small for real work". But the idea starts to get real traction.

But well, i have to admit, that our 8000-er blades are a sometimes little too big, in HPC or webserving for example. So ... today we announced the next blade system, the Sun Blade 6000, fullfilling the promise of the B1600 of a dense and multiarchitectural (Niagara, Opteron, Xeon) blade chassis with the technological advancements of the B8000 like PCIe as the chassis wide interconnect between system components. Some

The Register reports about announcement of quad and dual socket Intel Blades for our Modular Server chassis.

The four-socket blade server will fit into Sun's existing Blade 8000 chassis and should ship in the second half of this year. The system will be based on the four-core "Tigerton" version of Xeon from Intel and will support up to 128GB of memory.

I would prefer the Opteron Blades (an surely when Barcelona is out) out of several reasons like nested pages, better overall architecture and stuff like that, but your milage with your respective workload may vary. It´s certainly a good thing that we offer the Intel Blades for such workloads.

One interesting fact, but many errors: Sun's first Intel server will be a blade

The first Intel-based Sun product will be a blade server, and is expected to be released the first half of this year, SearchDataCenter.com has learned.

After updating all the other systems, the 4 proc blades for the Sun Fire 8000 Modular Server were refreshed with Socket F as Sun Blade X8420 Blade Server Module.

Yet another positive review of a Sun system at Network Computing: Analysis: Next-Gen Blade Servers. Although we didn´t win the shootout (you can argue about the metrics) the overall attitude and commentary to the system is very positive:

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the Sun Blade 8000 Modular System stems from Sun's decision to use a passive midplane concept that passes the PCI Express system bus through the system, rather than using blade-based GbE, FC or InfiniBand I/O fabrics.

and

But, considering that a fully-loaded Sun Blade 8000 Modular System offers the processing equivalent of 10 conventionally racked, four-socket 4U servers, the 8000 is an impressive, brushed aluminum tower of power.

The whole system will be even more impressive, when you take into consideration, that there will be UltraSPARC T1 blades for the system real soon now (I don´t think i tell you an secret here, as the changelog for Opensolaris already revealed it). Imagine a blade server where you can mix and match the processor technologies you need to fullfil your tasks with an uniform Solaris Operating Environment as an umbrella over the system.

Ich mag zwar irgendwie nicht ueber die Konkurrenz laestern, aber ich habe mir heute beim Warten auf den Flieger mal die Anleitung anguckt, wie man aus einer BX630 Dual-Procblade ein Vier- oder Achtsockelsystem macht. Wenn ich das mal so sagen darf: Bastelstunde. Ich möchte wirklich nicht wissen, wieviele Blades dabei kaputt gehen.Mal so eben nen Kabel stecken is nicht. Lest euch mal Seite 57 bis 98 durch. Ich glaube das Tauschen der Centerplane an einer E10K ist nicht wesentlich schwieriger.

Alle Blades muessen fast vollständig auseinander genommen werden. Man benoetigt so apartes Werkzeug wie einen 25cm langen Schraubenzieher. Es hätte mich wirklich nicht gewundert, wenn da auch noch irgendwo als Anforderung das Löteisen gestanden hätte. Das nächste Mal wenn mir irgendein Analyst in den entsprechenden Postillen mir erzählen will, das sowas ja sooooooo toll ist, dann moechte ich, das er das vor meinen Augen auch mal zusammenbaut

Nebenbei angemerkt: Wenn ich das richtig lese, kann ich bei einer 8-Prozessorblade aber keine PCI-Erweiterungen mehr einbauen (typischerweise wuerde man ja sowas als Computenode einsetzen, aber wo die Infinibandkarte reinstecken ?)

Ben wrote a nice roundup of the last Network Computing lauch. Really worth a read.

Enterprise Networking reports about our new server offerings and headlines: Trio of Servers Put Sun "Ahead of the Curve."

"None of these products are commodity offerings, they're top-of-class offerings. Sun is ahead of the curve," Jonathan Eunice, analyst with Illuminata, told internetnews.com.

The blade system is absolutely different from what HP and IBM are doing; this is a full bore data center play without any compromise.

news.com reported on 10th of july about the then upcoming x86 launch:

"Each one of them has flash," Eunice said. "In each one of the segments they targeted, they did something that is either unique or head-of-class to make it clear they're not just doing a me-too, yeah, yeah."

news.com posted an article about our new blade serversSun defends big blade server: 'Size matters'.
I tend to view the world like Andy:

"It's not that our blade is too large. It's that the others are too small," he said.

In the case you want expand the usage of blades for bigger workloads you need more processors or cores and you need for I/O. Both requirements leads to more electronics in you blade. With small blades you see two problems:

• Missing space. There is a paradoxon: The more you fill your blade with electronics, the more free space do you need to cool it down (fhere have to be some space for the air flow)
• Slots. The amount of I/O-Slots in a blade is a very precious resource. You can only build a certain amount of slots in a given amout of space. Basic Physics.

Da ist sie wieder. Die Story von den erweiterbaren Blades. Was einem nicht ausdrücklich erzaehlt wird: Wenn man zwei Blades zusammenschalten moechte, muessen meines Wissens in beiden Blades Opterons der 8xx-er Serie stecken, auch wenn man vielleicht die meiste Zeit nur 2-4 Prozessoren nutzt. Immerhin sind diese Verbindungskabel nicht viel mehr als einfach nur Verlängerungen von Hypertransport-Kanaelen.
Die Frage ist jetzt: Wer schraubt denn bitte viel teurere Prozessoren in all seine Blades für die Eventualität, das er irgendwann mal eine Blade auf 8 Prozessoren aufruesten will. Klar, das Feature macht sich auf jedem Datenblatt gut und ist technisch sehr interessant, aber ich glaube nicht an den wirtschaftlichen Nutzen einer solchen Loesung.

Ashlee Vance speculates about the new blade system: Sun travels to 'Andromeda' for blade server return:

All told, you can see that Sun is building out quite the impressive Opteron lineup.

And from a look as an insider. I´ve read the NDA presentations lately and the new blades are really impressive.

PS: Forget it, the NDAs are in an encrypted archive in an encrypted virtual drive. What a pity, that i´m not authorized to put such information in my blog, my pageviews would explode in a matter of seconds.