Guild Companies

Hewlett-Packard last week announced that it has upgraded the processors it uses in its ProLiant BL series of blade servers. The ProLiant BLs, which are also known by their code-name, QuickBlade, were one of the first X86-based blade servers to come to market, and HP says that it has sold 30,000 blades since the machines made their debut in January 2002. HP also talked about the prospects for various potential future blade technologies.

The initial QuickBlade machines, the ProLiant BL10e e-Class blade servers, have a 10/100Mbit Ethernet backplane in a chassis that holds 20 blades; 14 of these chassis can be put into a standard 42U rack, which yields a density of 280 processors per rack. The initial e-Class blades had two 10/100 Ethernet links, a 40 GB ATA disk drive, and two memory banks that supported up to 1 GB of SDRAM. HP used the 700 MHz Pentium III-M processors on these initial blades, and in 2002 they were upgraded to 800 MHz chips, followed by an upgrade to a 900 MHz Pentium III Ultra Low Voltage processor in January 2003. The latest BL10e blade is now equipped with a 1 GHz Pentium-M, which has double the on-chip L2 cache as the prior chips used in the blades. The price on this blade is actually a bit lower, at $1,759, than what HP was charging for blades 18 months ago with a lot less computing power. The BL10e blade is still equipped with a 40 GB ATA disk, and comes with 512 MB of main memory (that's one DIMM). Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2003 Server, Red Hat Linux, and UnitedLinux (which includes SuSE, Turbolinux, and Conectiva Linuxes) are supported on the machine.

Sally Stevens, director of product marketing for HP's blade servers, says that HP does not believe that the types of infrastructure workloads that customers are deploying on these entry blade servers requires HP to upgrade the Ethernet backplane in the BL10e chassis to Gigabit Ethernet. HP has, however, upgraded the second generation of its two-way BL20p and four-way BL40p blade servers with a peppier Gigabit Ethernet switch interconnect, which was designed in conjunction with telecom switch maker Nortel Networks. The ProLiant BL GbE2 Interconnect Switch, which provides the backplane connectivity between blades in the 6U p-Class QuickBlade chassis and to the outside world, has 24 ports. Two of these switches go into each BL p-Class machine. This new switch will be available in September, and HP will announce pricing then.

In addition to the improved switch, HP is rolling out faster "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon DP and "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors for the BL20p and BL40p blades. The blades with these faster processors plug right into the same p-Class chassis as the prior Xeon-based blades did. The second-generation BL20p blade has two 3.06 GHz Xeon DPs (each with 1 MB of on-chip L3 cache and a 533 MHz front side bus), 1 GB of main memory, three Gigabit Ethernet ports and one 10/100Mbit port. A disk drive is optional. This base machine costs $5,499, and a dual port Fibre Channel mezzanine card that allows the BP20p to link up to external SAN drives costs $6,499. These second generation p-Class machines can now boot off the SAN. The BL20p blades support Windows 2000 Server, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2003 Server, Red Hat Linux, and UnitedLinux.

The same operating systems are supported on the four-way B40p blades, which come with either 2 GHz/1 MB L3 cache or 2.8 GHz/2 MB L3 cache Xeon MP processors. The base BL40p with one 2 GHz Xeon MP and 512 MB of main memory sells for $8,199. The BL40p configured with two 2.8 GHz Xeon MPs, 1 GB of main memory, five Gigabit ports, one Integrated Lights Out management port, and battery-backed cache memory sells for $17,229.

In the future, says James Mouton, vice president of enterprise servers for the Intel-based server group at HP, HP will be making investments in developing iSCSI and remote direct memory access support for the blade servers, among other technologies that customers are asking for. HP will support the BSD and FreeBSD variants of Unix on the blade machines, but officially only Windows and Linux are supported on the boxes. HP is looking at possibly supporting NetWare, which could technically be done but which may not have a big market. Down the road, HP could even roll out an Itanium-based blade offering, which would be particularly appealing to customers looking for density and ease of management in the high performance computing (HPC) market. The low-voltage "Deerfield" variant of the "Madison" Itanium 2 that just started shipping in June is a good candidate, as is the special low-cache, high clock, low-price variant of the Madison has promised to the HPC market. "I'm very confident that we can put one in the chassis," says Mouton. "It's just a question of timing."