Guild Companies

IBM has announced that it will be supporting its BladeCenter blade servers as an optional building block component in the eServer Cluster 1350 server clusters that it sells. The Cluster 1350s are preconfigured server clusters based on IBM's xSeries line of machines, which use various processors from Intel as their main brains. IBM also sells a package called the eServer Cluster 1600, which is comprised of its own Power-based pSeries Unix servers.

Adding the BladeCenter machines to the cluster offerings makes sense. Sales of the BladeCenter machines running the open source Linux operating system have been good among organizations that would normally be characterized as high-performance computing shops--academic, government, and private supercomputing centers. That's not to say that the BladeCenters have not been adopted by customers for normal Linux and/or Windows Web infrastructure workloads. But with the BladeCenter machines packing up to 168 Intel "Prestonia" Xeon DP processors (running at 2.0 GHz, 2.4 GHz, 2.8 GHz, or 3.06 GHz) into a single rack, customers who are sensitive to the cost per gigaflops of computing power per square foot--such as HPC centers--are definitely into blade solutions like the BladeCenters. That's because the two-way BladeCenter HS20 cards offer twice the density as similar 1U form factor, two-way Prestonia servers made by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and others. Because it internalizes a high-speed network into its chassis, the BladeCenter design (like other blade server designs) also allows the number of cables needed to lash machines to each other and to users to be dramatically cut down compared to standard servers.

The Cluster 1350 configuration will include the BladeCenter machines as an option starting on June 6. The Cluster 1350 configurations also can include the 1U, two-way xSeries 335 servers and the 2U, two-way xSeries 345 servers, both of which are based on the same Intel Prestonia processors. (The bigger machine has more disk storage and slots). IBM is also allowing customers to use the xSeries 345 or the four-way xSeries 360 (based on the 1.5 GHz and 2 GHz "Gallatin" Xeon MP processor from Intel) as storage nodes. An xSeries 345 is used as a cluster management node, and it runs IBM's Cluster Management Software (CSM) software, which is a Linux-enabled implementation of IBM's PSSP clustering software for its AIX Unix variant. The Cluster 1350 setups can support Red Hat 7.3 and 8.0 and Enterprise Linux AS 2.1 on server nodes or SuSE Enterprise Server 7, 8, or 8.1. The Global Parallel File System for Linux 1.3 software is an optional component. IBM's FastT200 and FastT700 storage arrays can also be preconfigured in the Cluster 1350 offering. Once configured for a specific job for the customer, IBM integrates and tests the whole shebang and delivers it ready to run to the customer. They don't have to do any integration.

Dave Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM, says that the company is charging a modest premium price of about 1 to 2 percent on the preconfigured Cluster 1350 setups compared to the price of the raw components. He also says that while HPC is an obvious target market for the BladeCenter-based clusters, financial services and digital media companies are looking at them, and so are companies who are trying to shrink the physical size of and reduce the complexity of their data warehouses. Turek said that the density of computing power was not an issue with a lot of companies yet, many of whom have access to a lot of space, but that over the next year it would become a bigger issue. "Clearly, it is better to contemplate denser computing than it is to contemplate building a new facility."

When asked whether or not IBM planned to deliver a BladeCenter machine that would make use of the new 64-bit Opteron processor from Advanced Micro Devices, Turek would not comment. This is an obvious move for IBM, which has said that it will build its own Opteron machines this year and it would target the HPC market with whatever Opteron machines it creates. All Turek would say yesterday is that customers should watch this space for more announcements.

IBM's Supercomputing On Demand Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, has said that it would adopt the Cluster 1350s as its platform to sell computing capacity to customers on a pure utility model, and presumably it will use BladeCenters to support these customers for the very reasons that blade servers were designed--for high density and easy of management.