July 26, 2010 at 16:15Opteron in the Cloud: New HP BL685c G7 / BL465c G7 Blade Servers
Monopoly in any form is harmful to all subjects of economic activity. For some reason, with such a phrase from the textbook, it seemed logical to start a short story about where it is best to use the new HP Blade Servers BL685c and BL465c.The fact is that, unlike most other HP blades and other major players, these models are built on AMD Opteron processors, and not on the usual Xeons. Intel processors, no doubt, are good, but AMD does not eat its bread for nothing. The company's new processors are especially good in server applications, computing clusters and supercomputer systems where, in fact, they are most often found. “Opterons”, of course, for many reasons are not as popular and common as Intel processors, but the more interesting are the products based on them and the more interesting is their comparison with competitors. Finally, the fact that HP built its new blades specifically on the basis of Opteron already gives a serious credit of trust to AMD and causes nothing but respect.
But let's get back to the blades proper. In fact, a lot has been said and written about processors, and the HP BL685c and BL465c started shipping only at the end of June, and they will be put into actual operation just in the fall, after they reach and break in. That's about who these servers are best suited for, we’ll discuss today.
Two or four eight- or twelve-core processors are installed on the younger and older models. Against this background, there is no need to paint the potential performance of the system - and so it is clear that each of the blades gives serious power, but a full basket generally works like a thresher. What is better to take all these resources?
The answer lies on the surface: the same as previous HP blade systems, adjusted for increased workloads and consolidation of computing power, that is, resource virtualization and work with large databases. Moreover, the Virtual FlexFabric interconnect, as they say, allows. And as a correction, the now so popular clouds, public and private, will act. In their favor says a lot of memory and a good supply of physical network interfaces.
Of the practical points, it must be noted that 16 “small” BL465c can be installed in one chassis, which significantly (twice) reduces the likelihood of a failure point. Therefore, it is more practical to deploy a public cloud on BL465c, and leave the older model for databases. “Although, if the cloud is expanding across the enterprise, then why not,” says Yakov Ravshanov, director of the information technology department of the Oversan-Mercury data center. The main thing is using BL465c to take into account the number of running virtual machines per VMware vSphere 4.1 cluster.
The new machines have not yet passed the combat break-in, therefore it is quite difficult to judge the number of virtual parrots in real tasks. However, the fact that HP decided to use AMD Opteron processors in their servers suggests that they show themselves at least as good as classmates. Therefore, there is an opinion that the "Opterons" in the blades will still show themselves, and BL465c / 685c is the first serious step in this direction.
