IBM Announces BladeCenter Kickers

Published: February 14, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After a bit more than three years, IBM has taken the pole position in the blade server market, and at its launch event last week in the Dahesh Museum in the basement of the old 590 Madison headquarters of Big Blue in New York, the company's top brass strutted a little as they rolled out the next generation BladeCenter H blade server chassis and some nifty new blades based on Intel's new "Sossaman" dual-core Xeon DP, IBM's own dual-core PowerPC 970MP, and IBM's Cell PowerPC variant.

With the "H" in BladeCenter H standing for "high performance," you might be asking yourself, why not call it the BladeCenter HP, then? Well, that's your answer. HP, as in Hewlett-Packard, is IBM's main rival in the $2 billion blade server business, and there is no way IBM is going to put HP in the brand name. Then again, IBM's System and Technology Group, which designs, makes, and markets the company's five major lines of servers and which used to be called Server Group, doesn't use the word "server" much any more; it has, in fact, put the whole "eServer" marketing thing out to pasture very quietly. Everything is a "system" now--the System z9, the System i5, the System p5. It would be logical to call the next generation of IBM blade servers, then, the BladeSystems. But, alas, that is the name HP decided last year to call its own line of blade servers.

Bill Zeitler, senior vice president and group executive of Systems and Technology Group, was obviously quite pleased with how IBM, which was a late-comer to the blade server market when it entered in November 2002, has taken the market share lead in this space. This is all the more remarkable when you consider that both HP and the then-independent Compaq were making lots of noise about their respective blade servers a year earlier. IBM cited statistics from IDC that showed the blade server market approaching $2 billion in 2005 with a projection of sales reaching $10 billion, and about a fifth of the total server market, by 2010. He touted IDC's numbers, which say IBM sold slightly over $800 million in blade servers in 2005 and said that Big Blue would sell more than $1 billion of these machines in 2006. Since 2002, IBM has installed over 350,000 blade servers, and has probably sold around $1.6 billion in machines. If IBM tracks the industry growth and holds its market share, it will have a $5 billion blade server business by 2010. And if you haven't done the math, that could make blade servers IBM's largest server product line--bigger than its mainframe and Unix sales, and quite possibly bigger than its generic X64 server sales.

Another reason why blades are taking off is that they are, relatively speaking, more open. IBM's Blade.org community, which was announced last year, actually launched last week with 40 contributing members. Intel and IBM collectively share the intellectual property in the BladeCenter, and Intel has licensed it to over 100 different companies; in total, IBM says that 320 companies have licensed design specs for the BladeCenter so they can build gadgets that plug into it. IBM calls the BladeCenter a standard, which is stretching the truth quite a bit, but it is certainly a more open design than any other machine Big Blue has made since the PC AT. And the reason the BladeCenter machine is not completely open--IBM is not licensing the specs to processor blades, but just add-on blades--is that IBM remembers all too well about how it lost the PC business it created through aggressive openness. Having said that, the PC business also taught IBM to be open. "Customers are more in control than vendors in this new, open environment," explained Zeitler, which is why even though Big Blue dragged its feet, it eventually launched the Opteron-based LS20 blade servers last year. Zeitler also brought up the ghost of the PC Wars in discussing standards, and why compatibility is important. "Back then, we didn't want Compaq to win. We wanted to win. So we did PS/2 and OS/2, and we told customers that these things were better. Well, people didn't want better. They wanted compatible."

Both the old and new BladeCenter chasses can hold 14 blade servers, plus redundant switches and multiple power supplies. The new chassis has an extra 1U of space on the bottom and another 1U on the top, and from the front it looks like it can draw more air through the whole system through these areas. The new BladeCenter chassis has 40 Gb/sec of bandwidth, and will soon have a 4X InfiniBand switch to link to the outside world that offers a factor of 10 improvement in external bandwidth using four InfiniBand fabrics. (Cisco Systems' TopSpin unit is supplying the first InfiniBand switches and will also make its VFrame system management and provisioning software work on the BladeCenter H box.) This InfiniBand backbone offers 10 times the bandwidth of the prior BladeCenter. IBM also plans to support 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Fibre Channel connections into the box as well. This new H chassis supports four 2,900 watt, front-loaded power supplies and will be available in March for $3,849. That price includes a new advanced management module, which is a service and management processor with some smarts to do some of the administration work itself. This module manages each chassis and can link back into IBM Director (the tool IBM uses to manage all of its servers at a higher level) and the broader Tivoli suite of management tools, which can span architectures and geographically separated data centers.

While the new chassis is interesting and requires lots of engineering, the blades are important, and that is why IBM is upgrading its products. The most interesting new blade is based on the Cell Broadband Engine hybrid Power processor that IBM has created with Sony for the PlayStation 3 game console and with Toshiba for a variety of consumer electronic devices that need lots of computing power. IBM demonstrated a real-time rendering of Mount Rainier using 10-meter satellite images and only using one of the two Cell processors on a BladeCenter H blade. The difference in the rendering speed compared to a high-end workstation was, to put it mildly, ridiculous. Not only was the rendering impressive, but the lighting effects were also done in real-time--effects that are usually hard-coded into a simulation to be either day or night and to have the light in one position. You could move the sun around in this simulation and it had near life-like shadows and brightness. Why there are not Cell-based graphics cards on the market right now is a complete mystery.

The Cell blade is only available on a special-bid basis right now, but you can bet a lot of people are going to want to see how they can make use of this visualization power. Mercury Computer Systems is, for instance, partnering with IBM to create a system for rendering 3D models from CAT scans, and in a demonstration, a single Cell processor did a rendering that would have taken many minutes on a workstation in the blink of an eye. This kind of technology can and will change the way medicine is practiced. And IBM clearly wants other BladeCenter partners to come in and use such Cell-based blades for to create movies, simulate financial markets, and break into new areas with innovation.

To accomplish this, IBM is going to have to get a whole software stack running on Cell. Right now, the Fedora Core development version of Red Hat's Linux is running on the Cell blade, and it requires patches from IBM to work. IBM expects to start selling the Cell blade in the third quarter, which gives it some time to get the software stack in order.

IBM has also announced an improved HS20 blade that is based on Intel's Sossaman dual-core, low-power Xeon DP chip, which as we all know is really a tweaked Pentium M mobile chip with some server circuits wrapped around it. Sossaman runs at 3 GHz, has 2 MB of L2 cache per core, and an 800 MHz front side bus, and because each dual-core chip only dissipates 31 watts of heat when running normal workloads, IBM can put two of them on a blade and keep the total dissipation for the blade at about 180 watts. This is about half of what you can do with a regular Xeon DP blade, by the way. The question is, of course, how much performance do you sacrifice? This blade will support Windows and Linux, and Whitney said that she expected it to be particularly popular for Windows. This blade will be available in April, with a base price of $1,749.

IBM also announced a much-improved PowerPC blade that delivers about three times the performance of its existing product. The new JS21 blade uses single-core PowerPC 970FX processors running at 2.7 GHz or dual-core PowerPC 970MP processors running at 2.5 GHz and offering 1 MB of L2 cache per core. Last year's JS20 blade ran at 2.2 GHz, and the dual-core, two-socket JS21 offers three times the oomph. A base configuration will cost $2,499. This blade runs both AIX, IBM's Unix variant, and Linuxes from Red Hat and Novell. And, just to be nice, IBM has added virtualization extensions to the JS21 blade that will allow it to use its Virtualization Engine virtualization hypervisor, which it sells on its Power-based i5, p5, and OpenPower machines. This will be the first IBM blade to run IBM's own virtualization layer, and IBM is giving it away for free on these blades.

IBM took a lot of swipes at HP in its presentations last week, and said that a dual-core, two-socket JS21 blade server running AIX that was tested on the SPECint_rate2000 processor benchmark test had a peak runtime score of 67.9 at a cost of $5,856 for the blade. A two-socket JS20 blade on the same test had a rating of 21.5 on the test when it was run through the SPEC benchmark in late 2004 using AIX. For a Unix-to-Unix comparison, IBM cited a two-socket Itanium 2-based Integrity BL60p blade server from HP that had a rating of 33.4 on the SPECint_rate2000 test. Once again, this shows how much HP needs Intel to get its Itanium chips out on time. If the dual-core "Montecito" Itaniums were here now, as planned, IBM would not be able to make that jab, since a four-core, dual-socket Itanium blade would probably hit around exactly the same rating as the new JS21 blade. Of course, HP is charging a lot more for Itanium-based blades than IBM is for PowerPC-based blades. IBM reckons that the HP BL60p blade as configured in the test running HP-UX 11i would cost $11,247.

In a humorous demonstration that is sure to annoy HP, Balog brought out some of the components of the ProLiant BL line and showed how different they were from the IBM equivalents. IBM's blades were about one-third less long than HP's. And the HP BladeSystem had six pretty large power supplies, compared to four much smaller ones in the IBM BladeCenter. And IBM's Ethernet switch was ridiculously smaller than the one he showed coming from the HP product. "I think it is impactful to see the physical differences," Balog joked. And, it really was. IBM's market share gains from HP in the blade arena--a market HP controlled for the first 18 months of its existence--came about through good engineering. Something that both IBM and HP know lots about.

HP, it's your move.