Hitachi Aims New Blade Server at SMBs

Published: April 17, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server marker Hitachi is pushing further into the blade server market in North America today and will do something that no other major blade player does and that all of them should do if they want to expand their sales. It is so simple, it is obvious: provide power supplies that run on normal office 110 volt power as well as the 220 volt power that is commonly used in data centers. By doing this, Hitachi's BladeSymphony 320 is immediately more useful to small and medium sized businesses than alternatives from IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and various whitebox and niche players.

Hitachi has been selling the BladeSymphony 320 in its home market of Japan since last September, and its Hitachi America division, based in Brisbane, California, is bringing it to market in North America. Last November, Hitachi America brought the high-end BladeSymphony 1000 server to the States after demonstrating it as a "Montecito" Itanium box in July 2005 at Intel Developer Forum that fall. The product had similarly been sold in Japan for a few months before Hitachi brought it to North America.

The BladeSymphony 320 is based on a 6U chassis that uses two-socket blades and that can have up to 10 blades in the chassis. According to Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing for Hitachi America's Server Systems Group, the BladeSymphony 320 can support the full complement of blade servers, switches, and other gear using 220 volt power. But customers who only have 110 volt power cannot push it so far, since the chassis will run out of juice after six blades are added. The ability to use a blade server in a regular office environment or as a collection of remote servers is something that will be very attractive to many businesses, who don't want to run 220 volt power just to get the benefits of blades. For many companies, six two-socket servers are overkill anyway. The power supply supports both voltages, too, which means it can be repurposed without being reconfigured.

The BladeSymphony 320 has a blade that uses either the dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 or the quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon 5300 processors from Intel. Each blade has a front-accessible pair of 2.5-inch SATA or SAS disks, as well as four integrated Gigabit Ethernet ports and virtual CD, keyboard, video, and mouse connections that provide KVM and remote media support without the need for a KVM switch (each server has its own baby Web server and a unique IP address to log into the box). The blade supports up to 16 GB of main memory, and has an optional mezzanine card to provide two 2 Gb/sec Fibre Channel links out to external storage area networks.

The BladeSymphony 320 has been certified to run Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. VMware's ESX Server and related Infrastructure 3 products have been certified on the machines, and Campbell says that for the majority of customers where the BladeSymphony 320 plays, VMware is the only thing customers want so far. VMware is available now on this box, and will be available in North America within the month. Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 has been certified on the BladeSymphony 1000 box, but customers in Japan and early customers in North America for the BladeSymphony 320 have not asked for SLES 10, so it has not been certified yet.

The BladeSymphony 1000 is a 10U chassis that can support up to 10 blades based on either Itanium or Woodcrest or Clovertown Xeon DP processors. The "symphony" part of the product name is the ability to lash together multiple blades into a bigger SMP box when using the Montecito Itanium processors. Up to four two-socket blades can be ganged up with special cables to create a 16-core SMP box. The Itanium versions of the BladeSymphony 1000 also include Hitachi's own virtual machine hypervisor, called Virtage, which carves up the server in virtual machines that can house independent and incompatible operating systems.

Campbell says that Hitachi has no plans to crate a four-socket blade for either the BladeSymphony 320 or 1000 products. "With quad core, you don't need to," he says. "I think the bigger issue is having a smaller physical size, and moving to quad-core processors and 4 GB DIMMs lets you ride the technology curve to make smaller machines." Hitachi has no plans to adopt the Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices, either. "I think the market has changed in the past year and a half," says Campbell. "AMD is not the star it used to be and the Intel roadmap is the horse that we are riding."

One thing that the BladeSymphony 320 could probably use, given the SMB bend of the product, are integrated storage blades that have iSCSI links back to the processor blades. Using up the "free air" in the chassis to provide more balanced storage for the blades is probably a good idea. Using 2.5-inch SAS or SATA disks, Hitachi should be able to provide a setup that can stay in the 110 volt power budget.

A BladeSymphony chassis with a single Woodcrest blade with some main memory and a disk will cost around $10,000. It is available in North America immediately.

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