Appro Preps XtremeBlades for First Quarter

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The computer business may be compressing down to a handful of dominant architectures, but there is no shortage of innovation within those architectures. Appro, a specialist in the high performance computing (HPC) portion of the server market based in Milpitas, California, has been previewing its third generation of blade servers--this one based on Advanced Micro Devices's Opteron processors--and they can cram a dozen blade servers into a 7U chassis, or up to 72 processors in a full 42U industry-standard server rack.

The XtremeBlade chassis and blade servers are kickers to Appro's current HyperBlade servers, which debuted last year at the Supercomputing 2003 trade show in November 2003, pack 80 dual-processor Xeon DP blades into a single rack. Soon after than, Appro delivered HyperBlades that supported the Opteron 200 series processors and Intel's Itanium 2 processors.

With the XtremeBlade designs, Appro is foregoing a little processor density so it can integrate redundant InfiniBand and Gigabit Ethernet switches into the chassis, thus simplifying the configuration of blade clusters. Each XtremeBlade server has two 4X InfiniBand ports (the 4X ports run at 10 Gbps), which can be expanded to four ports with the addition of a daughter card; each blade also has two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The InfiniBand switch blade that plugs into the XtremeBlade chassis is based on the Mellanox InfiniScale III switch. Each two-way blade supports one or two Opteron 200 series processors and one or two hot-swappable SATA disk drives and up to 32 GB of DDR SDRAM main memory running at 400 MHz. The eight-way blade will have four SATA drives and support up to 64GB of main memory.

The XtremeBlade design also allows two-way, four-way, and eight-way blades (which take up one, two, or four slots in the chassis) to be mixed and matched inside a single chassis. Many early blade server designs required different chasses for blades of differing SMP scalability. The XtremeBlades will use the Opteron 200 series chips for two-ways and the Opteron 800 series chips for four-ways and eight-ways. Customers can use regular Opterons, or, if they are worried about heat, they can use the Opteron HE and Opteron EE variants of the chips, which drop the voltage on the chips by about 25 percent and cut back on power use and heat dissipation by as much as 65 percent. (These Opteron HE and EE chips cost a pretty penny, though.)

Appro has been supporting Windows and Linux on its HyperBlade systems, but sources at Appro say that the XtremeBlade servers, which will begin shipping in the first quarter of 2005, will be unique in another way: they will run the Solaris 10 variant of Unix. Appro is putting the finishing touches on a deal with Sun Microsystems to sell and support Solaris on the XtremeBlades. The support of Solaris may not be as big a deal in the HPC market as it is in the financial services and telecom markets where Solaris holds sway, but Solaris has a long history in HPC and the support of it on boxes like the XtremeBlades makes Solaris stronger in the long run.

Appro is not providing pricing information on the new Opteron-based XtremeBlades, but it is taking orders ahead of shipments if you are interested. In mid-2005, say company sources, the company will roll out XtremeBlades that use Intel's "Nocona" Xeon DP and MP processors, which support the same 64-bit extended memory scheme that was created by AMD for the Opterons. All of the new XtremeBlade servers, whether they use Opterons or Xeons, will use the same BladeDome II remote server management software that the HyperBlades use.