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Cool servers are coming

Posted on 18 Aug 2009 at 10:33

Jon Honeyball ponders the next generation of Intel servers and Hummers with supercomputers in the back

Once you start thinking about all the possibilities it's clear that there's a great deal that can be done in this area, and most of it has some relevance right down to the smallest branch office - it certainly shouldn't be confined to the large datacenter alone. Unfortunately, much of this stuff is still vapourware, and we'll need at least one more generation of the Intel server chipset before it supports variable voltages and clock cycles on a per-core basis, and even then it will need to be enabled and supported in the system software.

Blade runner

Finally, I must mention a server package that's really held my attention every time I've seen it at an exhibition, and a couple of my clients have bought into it too and have been very pleased.

I'm not normally a big fan of blade servers, because I tend to prefer to stick with individual chunks of technology that are easier and cheaper to manage when something goes wrong. Putting all your processing and storage into one large box is a lot like putting all your eggs in one basket.However, and it is a big however, once you see a rack solution that's as well-engineered as the HP BladeSystem c3000, affectionately known as "Shorty" (there's also a wheel-around office version known as "Big Tony") then it's hard not to be swayed.

Unfortunately, I sneaked a look at the price tags and discovered that HP is currently doing an offer, whereby if you buy a fairly reasonable set of blades it will give you the frame, power supplies and fans for free. So a server that comes in at around £11,000 is actually going to cost you around £7,000 after this rebate.

What do you get for that money? Well, you get four processor blades that contain Intel Xeon 5420 quad-core processors running at 2.5GHz. Each blade comes with 4GB of RAM and two 120GB SATA hard drives, and on the backplane you get a Gigabit Ethernet Layer 2 switch and a KVM module. Plus, there are all the licences for management, and for support there's a three-year warranty for four-hour, 24/7 support.

All put together this isn't a bad package, and don't forget you can slide in more horsepower whenever you want. And boy can you cram some serious power into one of these small blades. Want eight cores and lots of RAM? No problem. A full SAN controller and disk array? Yes, that fits on there too. How about a big tape drive to back everything up? That's possible too. I'm told that there's a set of special sand-proof covers and filters that go on the front and rear covers of the box, and that the US Army has fitted Shorties into the back of Hummer military 4x4s in Iraq. The mind boggles - a Hummer with a supercomputer cluster in the back seat.