Penguin Computing Dives Into the Blade Server Fray

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Blade server sales are expected to hit about $1 billion worldwide in 2004, and that means this subset of the server market will begin to attract more players. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, RLX Technologies, NEC, and others have been duking it out in the blade market, and Dell just got back into the game with its blades a few weeks ago. But when it comes to density of flops, but these vendors will have a tough compare to the big splash that Penguin Computing has just made with its BladeRunner blade servers.

IBM can put 14 two-way HS20 blades in a 7U BladeCenter chassis, RLX can do 10 two-ways in a 6U chassis, Dell can do 10 two-ways in a 7U chassis using its new PowerEdge 1855 blades, and HP can do eight two-way blades in a 6U chassis if you want local disk drives, and 16 blades if you want to hook to external SANs in its BladeSystem. The BladeRunner from Penguin jams a dozen two-way Xeon blades into a 4U chassis, which is 240 processors per rack.

One of the reasons Penguin can crame 24 Xeon DPs into a 4U space do this is that its blades are based on the Xeon LV variant of the 64-bit "Nocona" processors from Intel Corp. A regular Nocona Xeon DP chip dissipates about 100 watts running at 3.06 GHz; the Xeon LV, which runs at 2.8 GHz, dissipates only 70 watts. The regular 2.8 GHz Nocona costs $209, while the LV version costs $259. That's a minor change in performance and a relatively minor change in chip price for a big change in electric use and heat dissipation. To put it into terms the scientific and technical market can appreciate, by going with a dense design based on the Xeon LV, Penguin can pack more than a teraflops into a 42U rack.

The BladeRunner blade server is based on the ServerWorks Grand Champion LE chipset from Broadcom . It supports from 512 MB to 4 GB of main memory and has two memory slots that uses DDR PC2100 DIMMs. Each blade has two Gigabit Ethernet ports for linking to the blade chassis and switching infrastructure. To minimize heat dissipation and space requirements, Penguin has also decided to use 2.5-inch ATA-100 IDE disk drives for each blade, which can have up to two of these disk drives. The on-blade controller can stripe data across the two drives or mirror the drives. The design also has storage blades with two disk drives each and an optional RAID5 disk controller that allows the system to create a larger RAID5 array for a blade. Each blade has a single PCI-X slot for further expansion, plus two USB ports. The BladeRunner chassis has a Gigabit Ethernet switch with eight external ports and twelve internal ports to link to the blade servers. Customers can put in redundant Gigabit Ethernet switches for multipathing and redundancy; the two switches are linked by 10 Gigabit Ethernet links. In early 2005, Penguin says that it will upgrade the switching to include one or two external 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports per switch. An empty BladeRunner chassis is a bit pricey at $4,550. A basic blade with two Xeon LV processors, 1 GB of main memory, two 40 GB disks, and a license to Red Hat's Enterprise Linux WS costs $2,645.

Penguin says that it is aiming its BladeRunner machines at the generic commercial server market as well as the high-performance computing market where it is more of a player right now. Penguin bought Scyld Software, a specialist in developing commercial Beowulf Linux cluster software, in June 2003, and these blade servers are going to be sold not only as standalone blades, but as preconfigured Linux clusters. An entry cluster with the chassis, a single Gigabit Ethernet switch, one master management node, five compute nodes (each with 2GB of memory but booting from external disks), and one-year licenses for Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS and Scyld Beowulf clustering software costs $23,400. A cluster-in-a-box setup with twelve blades (one for management, eleven for computing) will cost $39,800.

While these two-way BladeRunners will be appealing to HPC customers and many commercial customers for infrastructure and application server workloads, Penguin is well aware that it needs to offer four-way or possibly eight-way blades to support larger database workloads. The company is mum about its plans. It does, however, already sell Opteron-based rack-mounted servers, and says that an Opteron variant of the BladeRunner is on the roadmap.