HP Goes Big Iron with Eight-Socket Opteron Box

Published: March 19, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Neither Hewlett-Packard nor its better half in the X86 and X64 server racket, Compaq, were strangers to high-end machines that spanned more than four processor sockets--even X86 designs, not just RISC or Itanium designs. But for whatever reason, HP and many other server makers have not pursued eight-socket or larger server designs, with IBM and Sun Microsystems being notable exceptions in recent years. But with virtualization driving the need for bigger boxes with more cores and larger main memories--and more profits--you can expect more big X64 boxes.

As part of a data center and virtualization extravaganza of product launches this week, HP gave customers a preview of a new 32-core, eight-socket server--and not one based on Intel's Itanium processors and HP's "Arches" chipset, but rather based on the forthcoming quad-core "Barcelona" Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Thanks to the HyperTransport interconnection scheme of the Opteron architecture, which has been in production for seven years now, server makers have been able to plug up to four motherboards together gluelessly--meaning without special chipsets--because of the NUMA architecture embodied in the HyperTransport scheme. But very few server makers have taken advantage of this feature of the Opterons. Including HP, up until Monday this week, that is.

This is a move back into eight-socket boxes after more than a two-year hiatus. HP killed off its last eight-socket ProLiant machines back in October 2005, just as Intel was delivering its first dual-core Xeons, the "Paxville" chips, if you will remember. (These were not particularly impressive, mind you. But the Paxvilles were a sign that Intel was beginning to pay attention, and the following spring, Intel ramped up its moves into dual-core and quad-core Xeon designs, thereby negating the benefits of packing lots of CPU sockets into a system.)

The new ProLiant DL785 G5 server is a 7U rack-mounted chassis that is based on AMD's forthcoming Opteron 8354 processors running at 2.2 GHz. The Opteron 8300 series can be used in systems with four or more sockets, and it looks like HP is gluing together two four-socket boards into a single NUMA cluster (rather than using four two-socket boards, for which it would use Opteron 2300 series chips). The machine has room for 64 DDR2 main memory modules, and supports up to 256 GB across the maximum 32 cores in this box using 4 GB DIMMs, which ain't so cheap these days, by the way. (Presumably the box will support cheaper 2 GB DIMMs, but HP does not say so.) The ProLiant 758 G5 server can only run 533 MHz DDR2 modules to support that 256 GB maximum main memory, and moving up to 667 MHz DDR2 main memory (for performance reasons) cuts the maximum memory for the box back to 128 GB. (Which does not sound like a fair trade.) HP says that it will support 8 GB DDR2 memory modules in the second half of 2008 after the ProLiant DL785 G5 ships; that will boost main memory up to 512 GB, which is a lot of memory, and I can assure you, it will cost beaucoup bucks, too. The machine is coming preconfigured with either four or eight quad-core Barcelonas as well--you can buy a base machine with just two in the box and then upgrade gradually.

The ProLiant DL785 has slots for eight 2.5-inch small form factor SAS drives, and if customers want to sacrifice the DVD unit and a few other peripherals in the front, they can cram another eight drives into the chassis. The motherboard has an integrate RAID controller--hopefully it is RAID 5 or RAID 6, but the HP spec sheet doesn't say--and has two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The unit also has an Integrated Lights Out 2 service processor. The server has 11 PCI-Express peripheral slots and an optional 7 PCI-Express slots through an expansion card. HP also plans to support direct HTX HyperTransport peripheral links in the second half of 2008.

The ProLiant 785 G5 server will start shipping in May at a starting price of $17,000 for a base configuration with four processors, no disks, and minimal memory. Windows, Linux (from Red Hat and Novell) and Solaris are being certified on the box. VMware's ESX Server, Microsoft's Virtual Server, and Oracle's VM hypervisors are also certified on the 32-core Opteron machine. Presumably Sun's xVM hypervisor, a variant of the open source Xen hypervisor, and Citrix Systems' XenServer, the de facto Xen standard now that it owns the Xen project and its commercialized products, are in the loop to be supported.

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