Hitachi Brings BladeSymphony Blade Servers to North America

Published: December 5, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hitachi America, the North American subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, wants a bigger piece of the IT pie in this hemisphere, and to that end the subsidiary last week announced that the BladeSymphony blade server product line it sells in Japan has been tweaked with a new set of processor and virtualization technologies and will now be available in the United States and Canada.

Hitachi, of course, is one of the giants of high tech and other industrial manufacturing, with nearly $81 billion in sales, with between 20 percent and 25 percent (depending on the year) coming from information technology and telecommunications systems. The BladeSymphony blade servers were announced in Japan two years ago, according to Steve Campbell, vice president of marketing for Hitachi America's Server Systems Group, and have been able to capture approximately 20 percent of Hitachi's home market. The current iteration of the BladeSymphony machines were announced in Japan in August 2006.

People outside of Japan got their first peek at the BladeSymphony machines when Intel goosed the clock speed on the "Madison" Itanium 2 processors in July 2005. At that time, the BladeSymphony blade server used the Madison chips with the 667 MHz front side bus and a chipset made by Hitachi itself. That chipset has the uncool real-world name of Hitachi Node Controller, but presumably it has a cooler name inside the company.

The blades in that original BladeSymphony machine had two processor sockets, and the chipset allowed up to four of these blades to be lashed together in an SMP configuration supporting up to 256 GB of main memory. At that time, back in the summer of 2005, Hitachi was promising to offer 64-bit Xeon chips on the BladeSymphony blades, too, and said that customers would be allowed to intermix Itanium and Xeon blades in a 10U chassis (which holds up to eight blades). So the symphony part is the ability to create SMP machines scaling from two to eight sockets on the fly, and to mix Itanium and Xeon processors in a single machine (although, for architectural reasons, not in the same SMP).

With the current iteration of the BladeSymphony machines, which have been shipping in Japan and Korean for the past six months, Hitachi has moved to the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 processors and stepped back to a 400 MHz front side bus. Hitachi is supporting the 1.6 GHz/24 MB, 1.6 GHz/18 MB, and 1.4 GHz/12 NB Itanium 9000 parts in the blade server. And because this is a dual-core chip, this machine with four blades can span from two to 16 cores in a single system image. Each blade has 16 DDR2 main memory slots, and using 2 GB DIMMs, that works out to 32 GB per blade or 128 GB in a 16-core SMP configuration. This is a good balance of GB per core, but it is half of what Hitachi was saying it would be a little over a year ago. Each blade has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, which plug into an integrated Gigabit Ethernet switch inside the BladeSymphony chassis; another 100 MB Ethernet network is implemented in the midplane of the BladeSymphony box for systems management. Each blade also plugs into an I/O cage that delivers two PCI slots per blade.

While the Itaniums are the big story because of the SMP electronics and the raw performance that the Itanium processors bring to number-crunching jobs, Hitachi is also shipping blades based on Intel's dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 processors. Customers who want to use these processors, which run cooler and are a lot cheaper, to support infrastructure and application workloads can do so in the BladeSymphony boxes. However, since the Woodcrest chips only support two-way SMP clustering, they cannot be used in conjunction with the Hitachi Node Controller chipset to create a 16-core SMP machine. Perhaps when Intel ships a Core architecture variant of the dual-core Xeon processors this will happen. And although Hitachi did not say this, it is almost certain that customers can use the quad-core "Clovertown" processors in these Xeon blades as well, which boosts performance another 50 percent or so.

"We have taken the data center workload and compressed it into a single chassis in a blade form factor," boasts Campbell.

The BladeSymphony server supports Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Itanium Edition (at the SP1 level) as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 AS. Campbell says that support for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is in the works.

Pricing for a base BladeSymphony box using Itanium processors starts at $25,000, which is the kind of vague price that vendors love to throw around. When pressed on pricing, Campbell says that on the Xeon blades, it will be competitive on price with IBM and Hewlett-Packard, which pretty much own the blade server market, and that with the Itanium SMP blades, Hitachi will be competitive with rack-based midrange servers using Itanium and RISC processors.

The other thing that Hitachi is counting on with the BladeSymphony blade servers is some home-grown virtualization technology, which is has created based on its mainframe technology. This virtualization hypervisor, called Virtage, not only allows for dynamic allocation of processors in an Itanium for CPUs, memory, and virtualized I/O--and all independently--but Virtage also allows specific processors, memory blocks, and I/O to be set aside and dedicated to specific logical partitions on a machine so they cannot be put into the dynamic resource pool. Virtage will also be able to carve up single processor core into logical partitions on the Itanium blades for workloads that are smaller than one core.

Virtage will presumably be used to virtualize Xeon-based blades in the machine, too, at some point. Probably when the Hitachi chipset is extended to support Xeon Core MP processors at some future date. If Intel delivers a converged Itanium-Xeon roadmap, as it had promised it would at some point a few years ago by 2007, this would solve that problem, perhaps. But Intel has been vague about the delivery schedule for the Common System Interconnect bus and chipsets for a merged Itanium and Xeon socket.

The BladeSymphony hardware is available now, and the Virtage hypervisor will be available in January 2007 for the Itanium blades.

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