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HP BL C-7000 Blade System

HP's new motto is "blade everything." I will explore this issue in another article in depth so I'm only going to give a quick rundown of reasons for blading systems. Everyone knows of management issues with large number of servers and with emergence of virtualization technologies such as VMWare it is increasingly important to have single management interface for all VMotion capable nodes. So there is the first reason to blade - simpler management. Other reasons immediately visible are wiring issues and the sheer computing density per 1U of rackspace.

Today's datacenters provide increasingly complex tasks and demand for incremental computing power unfortunately outpaces the growth of processing capacity of each of the systems. The issue is so big that in 2007 approximately 1.5% of all electric power consumed in United States was delivered to datacenters around the country. That is a very large drain. With blades you can improve your electrical efficiency of computers as well as the centralized HVAC when concentrated heat output can be channeled directly into return.

Enclosing Extreme Horsepower in HP C7000 rack

The BLC7000 exclosure is probably as close as you get in stacking enclosures before you have racking issues. This enclosure is 10U meaning it takes 10 standard rack units (or "slices of" 1.75 inches) and as standard rack is usually 42 usable units, you can place four of these enclosures and still have little space left for redundant cabinet switching or 2U worth of control unit.

In 10 units you would traditionally be able to place at most 10 computers. With the c7000 enclosure you succeed running 16 blade computers. Each of these blades could be for example BL460c equipped with two dual or quad-core Xeon processors. With eight cores per blade your processing power in one standard rack reaches 512 running cores. Not long ago this setup could dominate the top500 list of fastest computers in the world. Amazing how quickly times change, you could acquire this set up for mere $800,000 plus some extra for additional high speed backbone not including operating system software licenses.

Fully loaded BL C7000 blade enclosure

 

Sharing The Storage

Any large system of computers will sooner or later require consolidated storage else risk becoming unbearably expensive to acquire and maintain. Storage sharing is also required when virtualizing on technologies such as VMWare or Xen. Shared storage is used as quorum resource in most commercial clustering solutions. With 40 of 42 units used, you cannot really place any shared storage controller in same rack except for entry level 2U systems. This poses a problem and HP solved it with a very elegant solution. You can purchase SB40c. This blade is specifically designed for storage. The StorageWorsk SB40c storage blade is powered by Smart Array P400/256 controller and can drive up to 6 harddisks. The StorageWorks unit accept laptop sized (2 1/2 inch) hard disks in either SAS or SATA format with storage ranging from 36GB to 146GB for SAS version and 60GB or 120GB for SATA drives.

Fully loaded StorageWorks SB40C blade

 

Building on Tradition

HP blade enclosures go back a long way. The first enclosure system that I worked with was BL10E system from HP. Granted, this system offered lower-end computers in the BL-10 form but you could place incredible 20 blades in single 4U (yes only four units for 20 computers.) Since the early days, blades changed from consolidation vehicle for low end computers and evolved into new way of running your datacenter. Latest BLC7000 enclosure is only continuation of this shift that says simply: "blade everything"