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

[cavemanf16]

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...

Will heat be a problem?

[ThatComputerGuy]

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?

Not so dense?

[mybecq]

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

[Vrallis]

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

this bests my record :(

[jacquesm]

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

Compaq

[RedX]

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.

Re:disks not suitable for heavy duty applications

[NerdSlayer]

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


One of my good friends works as a chip designer for Dell. We were talking over beers last weekend about how Dell is coming out with the same thing soon, only with the option of having either the cheezy laptop drives OR a normal sized SCSI drive. You'll be able to choose between density or speed.

Re:Will heat be a problem?

[pointym5]

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.

Well, the dumb ones maybe. Somebody has to pay for the power, both for your rack of heaters and for the air conditioning. If an ISP doesn't figure out a way to pass those costs on (proportionately, you'd hope) to customers, it's eventually going to fail.

In fact it seems to me that a smart .com would try to optimize their power/page ratio and negotiate better terms from their ISP based on that effort. Convince the ISP to stick it to the people in the next rack!

This thing is a joke

[frost22]

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.

Rack space cheap!

[Computer!]

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?

Law suit waiting to happen

[lelitsch]

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