Hitachi Upgrades BladeSymphony Blades with Latest Intel CPUs

Published: July 9, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

About a year and a half ago, Japanese server maker Hitachi brought its BladeSymphony products over from its home market to start selling them in North America through its Hitachi America subsidiary. As June was winding down and the United States was following it as people prepared for the July 4th holiday, Hitachi refreshed the BladeSymphony line with the latest quad-core processors from Intel.

Specifically, the BladeSymphony 320s, which are aimed at small and medium businesses, and the BladeSymphony 1000s, which are higher-end, enterprise-class blades, have been updated to support Intel's "Harpertown" quad-core Xeon 5400 processors, in both regular and low-power, low-voltage variants. The blades also support the "Wolfdale" Xeon 5400 chips, which are dual-core processors that are due any day now and sporting frequencies of up to 3.2 GHz. Both family of chips are based on 45-nanometer chip processes. Hitachi also supports the "Montvale" dual-core Itanium 9000s on Itanium variants of the BladeSymphony blade servers, for those who want those processors. According to Steve Campbell, vice president of North American sales at Hitachi America, the low voltage chips allow up to ten blades to run in a 6U chassis and still work on 110-volt power. He says that depending on the comparison, the performance increases using the low-voltage Xeons compared to prior "Woodcrest" and "Clovertown" Xeons ranges from a factor of 1.8 to 2.6, but that power consumption comes down by about 30 percent. This is exactly the sort of increases that drive processor upgrades. A Symphony 320 blade with a single Wolfdale dual-core Xeon 3100 series processor and 1 GB of main memory sells for around $2,700.

Last year, Hitachi ported its homegrown Virtage hypervisor (which is based on its experience in providing logical partitions on mainframes) from the Itanium processor to Xeons on the BladeSymphony 1000 blades; VMware's ESX Server is the preferred hypervisor on the BladeSymphony 320 blades, which run in a 110-volt, 6U chassis suitable for office environments, which stands in contrast to the 240-volt chasses usually sold for data center environments (including the BladeSymphony 1000 chassis). Campbell says that on the 1000 series blades, the Virtage hypervisor is installed on about 90 percent of the machines. "Not everybody wants the hypervisor," Campbell says. "Some companies still do one application on one blade." ESX Server tends to be installed on about 40 percent of the 320-class blades, he says, which is still pretty good virtualization penetration.

In addition to the processor upgrades, the BladeSymphony 320s got a Web-based console for system management, a doubling of disk capacity on the blades (using SAS drives), and a couple of more resellers, including Praecipio Consulting, Consiliant, Data Partner Group, and I-Access; last year, distribution giant Avnet inked a deal to sell the BladeSymphony line.

RELATED STORIES

Hitachi Ports Its Virtage Hypervisor from Itanium to Xeon

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Hitachi Brings BladeSymphony Blade Servers to North America

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