HP Puts Out a Four-Socket Itanium Blade Server

Published: February 14, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Because of its density, integration, simplicity, and heterogeneous nature--not to mention the account control it gives to server makers because of a lack of standards--the blade form factor would seem to be the inevitable shape of all servers in the long run. But that can't happen as long as blade servers are limited in their processing and memory scalability. The excessive heat thrown off by enterprise-grade processors have prevented blade servers from scaling much beyond two sockets, but that is slowly changing. And that makes blade servers appropriate for relatively large workloads.

This week, for instance, Hewlett-Packard has put its second Itanium-based blade server into the field, the BL870c. (Well, it is the second one if you do not count the original "Powerbar" blade server designs that HP was working on and that conformed to form factors established by the telecommunications industry prior to HP's acquisition of Compaq in 2001.) The first Itanium-based blade server from HP, the BL860c, is a two-socket blade that was announced in February 2001 with support for HP-UX, OpenVMS, Linux, and Windows operating systems. This blade server fits into the BladeSystem c7000 chassis, a 10U box that runs on 240 volt power and that holds up to 16 half-height and 8 full-height blades, as well as in the new c3000 "Shorty" chassis, a 6U box that runs on 120 volt power and that has room for 8 half-height blades and 4 full-height blades. The BL860c was based on the dual-core "Montecito" Itanium 9000 processors running at 1.4 GHz or 1.6 GHz and could handle up to 48 GB of DDR2 main memory for the maximum four cores on the blade; it also had slots for two SAS disks, a RAID controller for mirroring data, and two dual-port Gigabit Ethernet ports. Like other entry Itanium machines announced in 2006 and 2007, the BL860c used HP's own "Titan" zx2 chipset.

The BL870c is a double-wide blade (meaning it takes up twice as much horizontal space in a chassis as the BL860c) that is also based on the Titan chipset, which was designed like its predecessor "Pluto" zx1 chipset, to span up to four processor sockets in a single symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) image for operating systems. The BL870c has four processor sockets and supports the newer "Montvale" Itanium 9100 series processors from Intel running at or 1.6 GHz (with either 18 MB or 24 MB of L3 cache) or 1.42 GHz (which has 12 MB of L3 cache). With the four-socket blade, HP can now put 128 Itanium cores in a 42U standard rack.

The Montvale Itaniums came to market late and without the expected performance bumps, but did have some extra power management features and larger cache memories to make them useful. HP deployed the Montvale Itaniums in its entry Integrity server line back in November 2007 and also put the chip into Integrity machines that were modified to support its NonStop fault tolerant clustering environment. (See HP Puts Montvale Itaniums into Integrity Line for more on that.)

The BL870c blade supports up to 96 GB of main memory, and has room for four hot-plug SAS drives and a RAID controller that supports mirroring. It also has two dual-port Gigabit Ethernet ports and three mezzanine slots of additional peripheral support.

Like the BL860c, the BL870c blade server supports HP-UX 11i v2 and v3, and customers can use the Foundation, Enterprise, or Mission Critical editions of either HP-UX version on the blades. These are the same versions of HP-UX that are supported on the entry and midrange rx Series and high-end Superdome Integrity servers. The new blade also supports the 64-bit Itanium versions of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003, either Enterprise Edition or Datacenter Edition; according to Lorraine Bartlett, director of server marketing for HP's Business Critical Systems division, the BL870c blade server will support Windows Server 2008, formerly known as Longhorn Server, as soon as Microsoft gets it out the door. (That software was released to manufacturing last week, so it is only a matter of time.) Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and 5 and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 have also been certified on the blade. Finally, HP's own OpenVMS v8.3 proprietary operating system, which also comes in Foundation, Enterprise, and Mission Critical editions, is also available on the blade.

HP is not providing list prices for the BL860c and BL870c blades in its online store, since these are generally sold by HP-UX sales reps and partners. Bartlett says that a base BL870c using the 1.4 GHZ Montvale (and with only one chip, or two cores, on the blade) plus 4 GB of main memory, and a single 36 GB disk will cost $7,892. An average configuration, with four 1.6 GHz cores (using 18 MB caches per chip), 8 GB of main memory, two 73 GB disks, a dual-port 4 Gb/sec Fibre Channel adapter, and some extra Ethernet ports will run $21,861.

As for who is using Itanium-based blades from HP thus far, Bartlett says that a lot of the two-socket BL860c blades sold so far have been used as application servers front-ending other systems. Obviously, the four-socket, eight-core BL870c blade will allow companies to support back-end databases on a blade format, and a future blade server based on another chipset and Intel's forthcoming "Tukwila" quad-core Itanium will push blades even deeper into data centers. The two-socket BL860c blade is also used in some supercomputer clusters where the floating point power, bandwidth, and large memory supported by the Itanium is more suitable than other X64 architectures. "We expect to see a lot more application deployments, and the BL870c will be quite a capable blade server," says Bartlett. HP-UX is the dominant operating system in use on the BL860c blade so far, but Linux is popular on supercomputer setups and Windows is used to support some databases and mail servers, too. The important thing as far as HP is concerned is that the configurations are rich--with an average of three cores installed on the BL860c--and that means it is a profitable little machine for HP.

By the way, the Tukwila chip and its QuickPath interconnect will require HP to put out a new chipset. So the future Itanium will not plug into the BL860c and BL870c blades.

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