12-blade blade for the HP BladeSystem

HP blades today account for more than half of global blade server sales. And the success of the HP BladeSystem c-Class, released five years ago, is largely due to the fact that HP has built, as they say, a large ecosystem of blades. In addition to the “massive” ProLiant BL460c dual-socket server blades, the HP BladeSystem c-Class chassis can also be equipped with HP Integrity four-socket blades and server blades based on Itanium processors, specialized virtualization and high-performance computing blades, and a form factor workstation blades.

A few years ago, HP StorageWorks developed the HP StorageWorks SB40c six-blade blade for the HP BladeSystem c-Class, as well as a blade with an integrated LTO tape drive. Now the company is introducing the new HP StorageWorks D2200sb Storage Blade, which, with the same dimensions as the SB40c (i.e., one half-height chassis bay), already holds twelve hot-swappable SAS 2.5 ”hard drives. Now it supports drives up to 600 GB, but 2.5-inch 1 TB SAS drives have already appeared. After the new discs pass the standard rigorous testing procedure, the maximum blade capacity will increase to 12 TB. The blade is equipped with an HP Smart Array P410i RAID Controller with 1GB non-volatile cache, supporting RAID 0, 1, 1 + 0, 5 and 6.

HP offers two options for using the new disk blade. At the first, it serves to expand the disk subsystem of the blade server installed in the adjacent compartment of the chassis, and connects to it via PCI Express. That is, it is used as a Direct Attached Storage (DAS) storage system.

The second option is to use the HP StorageWorks D2200sb as an iSCSI SAN network storage system, the resources of which can be used by all chassis blade servers and even other servers connected to the chassis via an Ethernet LAN. For this option, on the blade server to which a disk blade is directly connected via PCI Express, the HP P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance Software (VSA) is launched on the VMware ESX virtual machine. With VSA, the HP StorageWorks D2200sb implements advanced iSCSI SAN features such as building a disk blade cluster to scale capacity, Network RAID for increased resiliency, thin provisioning, snapshots, remote replication, and cloning.