Fujitsu Adds New Blade Chassis, Quad-Core Server

Published: June 27, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Server maker Fujitsu will this week put out a new blade server based on Intel's quad-core "Clovertown" Xeon 5300 processors and a new chassis for blade servers that packs a lot more I/O punch than its previous blade boxes and yet still maintains form factor compatibility with prior blade servers.

The Primergy BX600 S3 chassis is a 10U form factor rack mounted unit that has room for up to 10 BX600 series blade servers. The new chassis includes a new midplane that has three times the Ethernet bandwidth as the prior BX600 S2 chassis, with a total of 60 Gigabit Ethernet channels. The chassis also has iSCSI links for connectivity to network attached storage, and the box can be outfitted with a 12-port Fibre Channel switchblade (that's Fujitsu's term) that runs at 4 Gbps for linking to outboard storage area networks. (The switch has four uplink ports and eight downlink ports, and is expandable to 16 ports in total--six up and 10 down.) Fujitsu is also announcing a Gigabit Ethernet switchblade that supports the 42 LAN ports--12 up, and 30 down--to make use of the larger number of LAN ports that are on the new BX620 S4 blade server.

Old blades can plug into the new chassis, and the new BX620 S4 blade can plug into the two prior generations of Fujitsu's Primergy blade server chasses as well. But this doesn't happen all that much out there in the real world. "Even though customers are comforted by this mix and match capability, most people do not do this." explains Richard McCormack, senior vice president of marketing at Fujitsu Computer Systems (one of the various distribution arms of Fujitsu). "Customers tend to stay with blocks of the same type of server in a given chassis."

The BX620 S4 blade is a kicker to the S3 blade, and it supports either the dual-core "Woodcrest" Xeon 5100 processors from Intel or the quad-core Clovertowns. Fujitsu is supporting the Woodcrest chips running at 1.6 GHz, 2 GHz, and 3 GHz as well as the low-voltage variant of this part running at 2.33 GHz; Clovertowns are supported running at 1.86 GHz and 2.66 GHz. These chips support either 1 GHz or 1.3 GHz front side buses. The blade is based on Intel's 5000P chipset, just like its predecessor, and has two processor sockets just like the BX620 S3 did. The BX620 S4 blade supports up to 32 GB of fully buffered DDR2 memory, but you have to use 4 GB DIMMs to get that memory because the blade only has eight slots. (Four GB DIMMs are kinda pricey still, weighing in at around $1,000 on the street.) The BX620 S4 blade supports 73 GB and 147 GB 2.5-inch SAS disks spinning at 10K RPM, and has an on-board SAS disk controller that supports RAID 1 mirroring. The new blade has up six Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports on the blade. The blade has a two-port Fibre Channel expansion card to link the blade into the midplane and then out to SANs. If customers need more LAN ports, they can use the space on the server board for the Fibre Channel daughter card and plug in another four Gigabit Ethernet ports.

The BX620 S4 blade supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. Certification for the new RHEL 5 is coming, as is support for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 operating system in its many variants has been certified to run on the blade, and Fujitsu is also in the beta program for "Longhorn" Windows Server 2008 and will certify that on this blade as soon as it can in the wake of Microsoft's announcement next year.

The BX600 S3 chassis and BX620 S4 chassis were quietly announced in mid-May back in Japan, and are now being rolled out in North America. A BX620 S4 blade with a single Woodcrest chip and 1 GB of memory costs $1,948; the BX600 S3 chassis with a single Ethernet switch costs $7,176.

Given the amount of computing power that the new blades punch and the large amount of I/O feeding into them, these new blades are suitable boxes for server consolidation engendered by virtualization hypervisors. As is the case with other server makers, McCormack says that most of the virtualization that Fujitsu's customers are doing involve the virtualization of Windows platforms, and they generally do it through the use of a hypervisor from VMware. "We're seeing a greater acceptance and uptake on virtualization these days--even among SMB shops with no formal data center," says McCormack. And that is why Fujitsu has invested in its ServerView tools, which were created to manage physical servers, extending it to manage virtual ones. "Anything you have to do for 20 physical servers, you have to do for 20 virtual ones, after all," says McCormack. Fujitsu is also working on a tweak to its SystemWalker storage management tools, adding a feature called Resource Coordinator Virtual Server Edition V13.2, which will abstract the I/O links between blades and the SAN switches so blades can be plugged and unplugged from a chassis without needed to tweak the SAN on the other end. (In essence, the chassis presents itself as a big server to the SAN, which is blissfully unaware that it is actually a collection of servers.)

Fujitsu is also, of course, pitching a much more sophisticated form of server and application virtualization it calls FlexFrame, which abstracts a complex ERP system and allows it to run in a utility-style fashion on a collection of its blade servers. Fujitsu has created FlexFrame setups for SAP and Oracle ERP suites, and supports Linux and Solaris underneath the whole shebang.

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